{"id":2878,"date":"2014-07-14T11:40:39","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T17:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=2878"},"modified":"2014-07-14T11:41:11","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T17:41:11","slug":"study-finds-bear-jams-in-parks-are-worth-the-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/07\/study-finds-bear-jams-in-parks-are-worth-the-trouble\/","title":{"rendered":"Study finds ‘bear jams’ in parks are worth the trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"In<\/a>

Photo courtesy of Grand Teton National Park<\/p>

In Grand Teton National Park just south of Yellowstone, a volunteer wildlife brigade (in the yellow vests) is trained to help manage people at bear jams. Both parks’ programs run up considerable expenses, but a study says roadside bears in Yellowstone bring more than $10 million annually to the regional economy.<\/p><\/div>\n

Yellowstone visitors would pay an additional $41 to ensure seeing roadside grizzlies, a study shows, and the attraction creates 155 jobs and more than $10 million a year for the regional economy.<\/p>\n

The $41 visitors would pay is on top of the $25-per-vehicle entrance fee. If Yellowstone no longer allowed grizzly bears to use roadside habitat \u2014 and instead chased, moved or killed them \u2014 the regional economy would lose more than $10 million a year and 155 jobs according to the paper \u201cThe economics of roadside bear viewing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Allowing 500-pound bears to frolic by roads, back up traffic and entertain thousands of visitors comes with a cost, however. Park rangers and other employees spent more than 2,542 man-hours managing 1,031 bear jams in the world\u2019s first national park in 2011, the study says. That amounts to more \u2014 probably much more \u2014 than $50,000 a year according to calculations made by WyoFile and based on other park figures and information.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re spending a lot of time, staff time and overtime,\u201d said Kerry Gunther,\u00a0Yellowstone\u2019s bear management biologist and a co-author of the report. \u201cManagers are wondering \u2026 should we do something different?\u201d<\/p>\n

The study shows that while changes to roadside bear management might appear to save Yellowstone money, they would have broader consequences amounting to perhaps 4 percent of the regional economy.<\/p>\n

Gunther, Leslie Richardson, Tatjana Rosen, and Chuck Schwartz published the study in The Journal of Environmental Management early this year. It appears at a time of limited park budgets but increasing visitation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe definitely have to tighten our belts,\u201d Gunther said. \u201cBudgets aren\u2019t really keeping pace with visitation. Managers are asking tough questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among those are whether the park should continue to pay rangers to be \u201cbasically baby-sitting people at bear jams,\u201d Gunther said.<\/p>\n

That people would pay $41 extra to see grizzly bears by the roadside was unexpected.
\n\u201cThat kind of surprised us because people usually don\u2019t want to pay higher entrance fees for anything,\u201d Gunther said. The study might have produced an even higher value had it offered the 663 respondents a hypothetical chance to pay more than $50 to ensure roadside bears, authors said.<\/p>\n

In any case, \u201cIt helps emphasize how important bears are to our visitors,\u201d Gunther said.
\nYellowstone isn\u2019t going to use the survey to start charging a $66 entrance fee anytime soon, park spokesman Al Nash said. Yet, \u201cour management group certainly has had discussions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe continue to try and look at whatever the appropriate balance is when it comes to any kind of fees,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re very conscious that changes, if they occur, need to be respectful of our visitor population and need to be incremental.\u201d<\/p>\n

Park entrance fees are relatively insignificant compared to other costs associated with a Yellowstone visit, Nash said. The $25-per-car entrance fee is good for seven days and includes entrance to Grand Teton National Park.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou spend more on gas to get from Jackson to the South Entrance than we\u2019re going to get,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Parks may pay attention to revenue these days now that they\u2019re allowed to keep a portion of some money collected and other funds are scarcer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe percentage we keep has become more important to us even though there are significant restrictions on how that may be used,\u201d Nash said. \u201cUltimately, anything we do will have to be approved in Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bear jams occur in nearby Grand Teton National Park where bear 399 became a national celebrity while raising cubs near highways. A team of bear-jam volunteers led by a full-time employee patrols the roadside hotspots to prevent conflicts. The Wildlife Brigade program isn\u2019t free to the Park Service, however.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does come with a cost,\u201d spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of support, training, uniforms, vehicles. \u201cMost [volunteers] are retired who need some kind of housing, trailer spots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yellowstone roadside bear history stretches back the early 1900s when, former park researcher Paul Schullery wrote, a black bear cub earned the nickname Jesse James after persistently begging for food near the West Entrance. Soon enough Yogi and BooBoo, and even Mr. Park Ranger, became part of the American wilderness vernacular.<\/p>\n

When mentioning Yellowstone \u201ceverybody thought \u2018bears,\u2019 first,\u201d spokesman Nash said about the park\u2019s place in the American psyche. In spite of world-famous Old Faithful, \u201cwildlife viewing is really the most popular activity,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve talked to people who thought there was \u2018a\u2019 geyser.\u201d<\/p>\n

Officials stopped all artificial feeding in the 1970s and the grizzly population dipped. With programs enacted through the Endangered Species Act starting in 1975, grizzlies became more numerous and visible. As the backcountry filled up with grizzlies, they began using roadside habitat they had previously avoided.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s the park didn\u2019t let grizzlies hang out along Yellowstone\u2019s 300 miles of roads where people could readily see them. Managers worried bears would be fed, come to associate people with food, and therefore become unnaturally dangerous. Or they might get hit by cars.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe initially tried trapping and moving those bears,\u201d Gunther said. \u201cThat\u2019s more of a Band-aid approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bears would return, faithful to their home turf. Or they would be chased out of a foreign neighborhood.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people like to think there\u2019s this big happy valley where we can move bears,\u201d Gunther said. But no; \u201cThe park\u2019s full.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hazing \u2014 including shooting rubber bullets \u2014 didn\u2019t work, either. Olaus Murie had learned that as early as 1944, Gunther said in a 2008 article in Yellowstone Science.<\/p>\n

\u201cExperience has shown that the bear learns to recognize the particular person or car that administers the shock or other punishment, and he simply avoids that person or car in the future, but does not fear other persons or cars,\u201d Gunther quoted from a Murie park file.<\/p>\n

Plus, bears\u2019 natural food occurs alongside highways. Those include ungulate carcasses, elk calves, whitebark pine seeds, clover, biscuit root, pocket gophers, yampa roots and rose hips, Gunther wrote. \u201cIt would take more than rubber bullets and cracker shells to change centuries of bear evolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Managers sought another tactic, Gunther said. \u201cLet\u2019s manage people.
\n\u201cIt started small \u2014 a few dozen bear jams a year,\u201d Gunther said. \u201cIt worked very well. The public loved it. Today, we easily have 1,000 bear jams a year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bears, too, became used to the scene. They became habituated to people and cars, but not conditioned to associate traffic jams with an opportunity to run off with a picnic basket.<\/p>\n

\u201cHabituation of bears to humans in YNP allows them to access and utilize high quality habitat in areas with high levels of human activity without incurring the energetic costs of fleeing every time a park visitor appears,\u201d Gunther wrote in Yellowstone Science.<\/p>\n

One option Yellowstone and Grand Teton have would be to let the bear-jam scene play out without ranger supervision. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what would happen if we just said \u2018let it be,\u2019\u201d Gunther said.<\/p>\n

Given human nature and past experience, the probability that somebody would break no-feeding rules or get too close is high.<\/p>\n

\u201cEventually the bear gets in trouble and gets removed,\u201d Gunther said. \u201cAlso, if somebody gets hurt, that can be a setback not only to the individual bear but to the bear population as a whole. It just builds fear of bears in people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Managers are wary of an Arizona lawsuit against wildlife officials that was settled for $2.5 million after a girl was mauled by a black bear known to have been a problem.
\n\u201cSo we also have to look out for the taxpayers\u2019 money from a lawsuit point of view,\u201d Gunther said.<\/p>\n

Allowing visitors to see bears up close in the natural world stirs awe and inspires an appreciation for conservation of the species, biologists say.<\/p>\n

Not all bear jams can be staffed today. \u201cThere are currently more \u2018bear jams\u2019 on Park roads than Park rangers to manage them, causing a strain on existing Park personnel as well as increased concern for visitor safety,\u201d Gunther and his colleagues wrote.
\nWhere rangers are present, things have gone well.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve never had a person hurt by a bear at a bear jam,\u201d Gunther said. But, \u201cwe\u2019ve had a few people injured by vehicles.\u201d<\/p>\n

After 31 years working with Yellowstone grizzlies, the luster of watching roadside bears has faded for Gunther.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me it\u2019s a lot more special to be in the backcountry,\u201d he said. Not everybody has the wherewithal to get to Gunther\u2019s wilderness yet Yellowstone\u2019s grizzlies remain valuable to them.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor people who live in a big city, it\u2019s probably the greatest thing in the world,\u201d Gunther said.<\/p>\n

Republished with permission from WyoFile.com<\/a>. Angus M. Thuermer Jr. is the natural resources reporter for WyoFile. He began working at the Jackson Hole News in 1978, and was editor of the Jackson Hole News and Jackson Hole News&Guide before joining WyoFile. Contact him at angus@wyofile.com or (307) 690-5586. Follow him @AngusThuermer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yellowstone visitors would pay an additional $41 to ensure seeing roadside grizzlies, a study shows, and the attraction creates 155 jobs and more than $10 million a year for the regional economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":2879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[995,992,993,994,119],"class_list":["post-2878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-chuck-schwartz","tag-grand-teton-national-park","tag-kerry-gunter","tag-tatjana-rosen","tag-yellowstone-national-park","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}