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SIERRA VISTA — State wildlife managers will issue citations, if necessary, to stop people from feeding bears.
“The brain of a bear starts in his belly,” said John Millican, a wildlife manager with the Arizona Game and Fish Department, as he spoke about black bears to the Huachuca Audubon Society on Tuesday night. More than 20 people attended the presentation at Cochise College.
Last summer saw an unprecedented number of young male bears wandering out of the Huachuca Mountains in search of food. Between October 2005 and the monsoon starting in July 2006, only a tenth of an inch of precipitation fell in the Huachucas, thus decimating bears’ natural food sources — manzanita and juniper berries.
 John Millican, center, a local wildlife manager for Arizona Game and Fish Department, talks with Wally Waldenstrom of Sierra Vista, right, and another man on Tuesday at Cochise College. (Ted Morris-Herald/Review) |
Wildlife managers are hopeful that those berries will be more plentiful this year. The yield of this crop will be known in about a month or so.
Meanwhile, the managers are expending a lot of shoe leather in going door to door to educate humans about their responsibility in co-existing with bears.
“It’s not the bear’s problem,” Millican said, urging people to manage garbage and pet and bird food more wisely. One of the biggest problems is putting garbage cans out the night before pickup, instead of taking them out in the morning. Bears are nocturnal critters.
Game and Fish officials are concerned about some people’s attitude that garbage-feeding bears are not their problem.
They expect Game and Fish to come out and trap or kill the bear while failing to make necessary adaptations to living in the so-called urban-wild interface.
“A fed bear is a dead bear” is the slogan that wildlife managers are impressing on people.
In addition to a number of hungry bears being shot dead, electrocuted when climbing utility poles or killed on the highways, there were 20 bears that were moved last year, Millican said. Three problem bears came back and caused more trouble.
“It was very frustrating this last year,” Millican said, noting he answered up to 13 bear calls in a 24-hour period.
“We’re not here to kill animals; we’re here to protect them,” said Millican, whose area encompasses a million acres between the San Pedro River and Nogales.
He said Game and Fish officials have consulted with the Cochise County Attorney’s Office and established prosecutorial rules of engagement. After the wildlife managers have made an attempt to educate people about behavior that encourages problem bears, one warning will be issued. Then citations will come.
A man in the audience asked why property owners must be cited, when, as Millican had noted earlier, there is evidence illegal immigrants have introduced human food into the wildlife environment.
Millican did not discuss the migrant problem, but he said his job is to stop the public from sustaining the bears. He said bears were smart enough last year to figure out, for example, the Fort Huachuca trash cycle: Monday and Thursday. The wildlife managers were baffled at first why Mondays saw a lot of bears feeding from trash on the post, but there was mysteriously little bear activity on Thursdays. Upon further inspection, it became apparent that there were parties happening on the weekend, and the Monday trash cans were full of goodies.
“We’re the biggest problem; we really are,” said Pat Berry, co-chairman of the Huachuca Audubon Society’s conservation committee.
CITY EDITOR Ted Morris can be reached at 515-4614.
Joe Hicks wrote on Oct 8, 2007 2:22 PM: