For the week of August 14 - 20, 2002

Second bear shot in valley by IDFG

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By GREG MOORE
Express Staff Writer

A small black bear deemed to have lost its fear of people was shot at Cathedral Pines Baptist Camp north of Ketchum on Sunday. It was the second troublesome bear dispatched by local Idaho Fish and Game officers in the past two weeks.

Conservation Officer Lee Garwood said the sub-adult, 130-pound bear had been poking about the children’s camp for most of last week, particularly attracted to its non-bear-proof garbage bins. Garwood said he placed a culvert trap at the camp Friday, but by Saturday night the bear had not entered it and was back in the garbage.

Garwood said he got a call at 11 a.m. Sunday saying the bear was in the middle of the camp "showing absolutely no fear of humans." He drove up there and tried to scare the bear off, but it refused to go far.

"That’s not normal bear behavior," he said.

Garwood said he decided there was no alternative but to shoot it.

A 392-pound bear was shot July 29 near Lower Board Ranch, out Warm Springs Road, after it broke into the same house two nights in a row. Fish and Game officers believe the bear was responsible for numerous such incidents over the past two years.

Since the bear was shot, Garwood said, "the bear calls in Warm Springs and West Ketchum have evaporated."

He said there remain about five bears living near Ketchum and Sun Valley.

Garwood repeated entreaties to the public to use bear-proof Dumpsters, available from local trash collection companies, and to avoid putting garbage cans out the night before collection. He said he counted 100 garbage cans out on a recent Tuesday night in one area of west Ketchum. On Wednesday morning, 28 of them had been knocked over.

"That’s just throwing bear bait out there in the middle of the night," he said.

Without changes in human behavior, he said, more killings of local black bears will be inevitable.

"When they become habituated to human food, it’s terribly hard to break them of the habit," he said.

 

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