A bear’s nose knows when the smell of food wafts through the air. It’s integral to their survival, this tool for finding food, and is the reason why one resident of Montana’s Swan Valley has made it her summer’s work to pick up other people’s trash.
Kathy Koors has spent nearly 40 years living near Condon, Montana, in a pocket of the Treasure State defined largely by water and trees. Larch, lodgepole and Douglas fir mingle in dense stands around azure lakes squeezed between the Mission Mountains and Swan Range. It’s a place sprouting with new subdivisions and second homeowners, a place outdoor lovers flock to, and a place where grizzly bears abound.
After years of volunteering her time picking up trash along trails and in campgrounds and visiting with neighbors about ways to keep bears out of human spaces, Koors is working this summer as the new Swan Valley Bear Ranger, which is housed under the Living with Wildlife Foundation with support from private donors, U.S. Forest Service and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The position is one Koors took initiative to create and is a valuable partnership between the local community and state and federal agencies.
Koors pays close attention to campgrounds, stopping in on Fridays as campers get settled, and visiting throughout the weekend to pick up trash, answer questions and offer kind advice. She also keeps an eye out for residential trash problems and if she sees trash on the side of a road—or a trash container obviously busted into by a bear—she stops to clean it up. She encourages residents to take advantage of Swan Valley Bear Resources’ bear-resistant trash container loan program, which also happens to be free, and she volunteers to help residents clean up other attractants around the yard as well.
“There are ways to live with bears,” she says. “We need to keep bears wild. If we want to be able to see bears or know they’re living among us, it means we are responsible for keeping them safe and keeping them safe means not attracting them to dig in our gardens or lure them in with a bird feeder.”
Ultimately, this effort in the Swan is an example of finding local solutions to the challenges that come with living among grizzly bears, and is the kind of proactive work members of the Montana Governor’s Grizzly Bear Advisory Council have emphasized as they draft a series of management recommendations that could guide how state officials oversee grizzly bear populations. The council, which is composed of 18 Montana citizens, convened July 21-22 in preparation for finalizing recommendations in August.
Join the council’s discussion by reading its draft recommendations and submitting input at fwp.mt.gov/gbac. For more information about the Swan Valley Bear Ranger program, visit https://grizzlybearcollective.com/living-with-bears/it_takes_a_village/.
Jessianne Castle lives west of Montana’s Flathead Valley. She is a freelance writer, range rider and founder of the Grizzly Bear Collective.
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