Keeping bears and people safe

Each spring, there's a subset of grizzly bears that act like teenagers cut loose from home for the first time.

With mother bears turning their attention to mating or younger cubs, the two- or three-year old sub-adults start getting ignored and kicked out. Parentless for the first time, these young grizzlies walk into a world of stimuli that they're still learning to interpret. It can be a dangerous time.

It was two of those freewheeling subadult grizzlies that a boater recently filmed swimming across Lake Frances in central Montana, near Valier. It's a cute video, but the lessons behind it are more sober. When grizzlies spend time close to people many form bad habits, especially if the incidents begin at a young age. Often involving easy meals like grain feed or domestic livestock, the habits quickly become very hard for a scavenging omnivore to break.

The end is usually a death sentence or expensive relocation for the bear, and in many parts of Montana, conflicts and mortalities hit record numbers in 2018.

It doesn't have to be that way. As grizzlies reclaim historic range from central Montana to northeastern Washington, wildlife managers and communities are expanding their toolbox for preventing ursine conflicts. Through our conservation partnerships across the region, Vital Ground supports those mitigation efforts. From electric fencing to bear spray education to dead stock removal programs, we collaborate broadly to keep bears and people safe.

Collaborative Conservation in the Swan

Thanks to generous support from the ALSAM Foundation, this year Vital Ground is funding 13 different community and conservation organizations focused on preventing bear-related conflicts. One of those partners is a longtime teammate, the agency-nonprofit collaborative group Swan Valley Bear Resources (SVBR).

"We do a lot of work with private landowners to help them minimize their chances of a bear conflict," says Luke Lamar, conservation director for Swan Valley Connections, a member of SVBR. This year, Vital Ground will support SVBR's bear-resistant garbage container loaner program for Bigfork and Ferndale, as well as electric fencing and outreach efforts in those grizzly hotspots.

"We've had bears roll them around and chew on them and not get into the garbage," Lamar says of the loaner containers. "It's a great way to secure your garbage attractants."

As for fencing, SVBR members will walk families through every step of this proven conflict-prevention tool.

"We'll help private landowners design electric fencing, come up with specifications and a materials list, help them find funding, and we'll even come out and help build the fence," says Lamar. "We couldn't offer all these resources without help from Vital Ground."

Building Coexistence from Wyoming to Washington

Beyond the Swan, Vital Ground's partnerships will mitigate conflicts in the most critical places for our region's recovering and reconnecting grizzly populations. Over the last two years, Vital Ground completed a groundbreaking conservation plan, collaborating with more than 60 federal, state and tribal biologists and wildlife managers to locate the most important opportunities for habitat conservation and conflict prevention. Our One Landscape Initiative is the result, a strategic effort to protect 188,000 acres of priority habitat on private lands and prevent conflicts in 21 especially urgent locations.

As a land trust, our primary focus remains habitat protection through conservation agreements and land purchases, the on-the-ground work we've completed in the Swan over the past 15 years. But preventing conflicts is a crucial complement to this mission. Safeguarded habitat isn't worth much if the moment a bear steps off of it, she stumbles into an incident with people or their property. If grizzlies are to reconnect their fragmented range in the Lower 48 and secure a durable future here, they need both physical and social habitat.

That's why our 2019 partnerships have greater geographic reach than ever, supporting crucial work in 10 of our 21 identified hotspots for bear conflicts.

The Bitterroot Valley represents a key crossroads in many projections of future bear dispersal, so we're partnering with People & Carnivores on two electric fencing projects. Farther north, we're supporting the Great Bear Foundation's apple pickup program in the Missoula foothills. And in an area with especially high conflict numbers last year, we're backing the Blackfoot Challenge's electric fencing efforts at the Helmville Transfer Site and Sunset Guest Ranch, as well as their collaborative livestock carcass removal work with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.

Elsewhere, we're helping bears and other predators stay safe west of Glacier through the Trego Range Riding Collaborative's carcass removal and outreach program. We're also backing the Be Bear Aware educational trailer, which offers bear spray training and other education to communities throughout western Montana, northern Idaho and eastern Washington.

Finally, we've expanded our partnership efforts in the crucial Yellowstone-to-Glacier linkage areas of southwestern Montana, helping fund carcass removal and composting in the Madison Valley as well as education and outreach ranging from the Ruby and Centennial Valleys to the Big Hole and Upper Clark Fork areas.

Collaborative Conservation

Nearly all of these partner projects fall in areas our planning identifies as crucial to the grizzly's recovery in the Lower 48. To meet the goal of our One Landscape effort, partnerships like these represent a vital piece of the puzzle.

Just as important is the support of conservation-minded individuals who believe in protecting the open space and iconic wildlife that set our region apart. To learn more about One Landscape and contribute to the effort, please visit vitalground.org/one-landscape.

An accredited land trust and 501(c)(3) organization, Vital Ground conserves habitat for grizzly bears and other wildlife in the Northern Rockies and Inland Northwest. Founded in 1990 and based in Missoula, Mont., the organization also partners with communities to prevent conflicts between bears and people.