26 Aug Mountain Village: Tips for Living in Bear Country!
Mountain Village and the Telluride region in general are seeing increased bear activity this summer due to drought conditions. Numerous regional homes have reported bears entering open garage doors and even getting into homes through unlocked ground-level doors and windows. Please consider sharing this news with your local friends, guests and family members.
Want more info? Visit cpw.state.co.us/living-bears or bearwise.org.
A few simple steps make a big difference:
• Keep garage doors closed at all times and lock walk through doors on ground level
• Put trash bins out the morning of pickup, not the night before
• Make sure all containers are secured with bear proof locks and don’t put out trash not in the bin
• Have your trash bin regularly cleaned- Pristine Bins recently launched as a mobile trash, recycling and compost bin cleaning service
• Take down bird feeders
• Don’t leave pet food outside
• Clean BBQ grills after each use
• Lock your car, and roll up windows bears can smell chapstick, sunscreen or a few stray crumbs
Why bears are so active right now:
According to John Livingston, Southwest Region Public Information Officer for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, this has been a rough year for natural bear food. Dry conditions have left acorns, rose hips and chokecherries scarce, right as bears head into hyperphagia, the late summer and fall feeding stretch when they need to pack away roughly 20,000 calories a day before denning.
The good news is bears are resourceful and finding other ways to get those calories. Along with traditional staples like ants, ant larvae and other insects, wildlife officials are seeing bears rely more on carrion this year, including deer fawns, and there have even been videos this week of bears bringing down elk.
Bears don’t need people to feed them to get through a lean year.
Please don’t feed bears, even unintentionally.
It’s taken more than 20 years of community effort to teach local bears to find their own food instead of relying on humans. Leaving out trash, pet food or other attractants this summer, even out of sympathy for a tough year, can undo that progress fast and create a generational problem, teaching bears and their cubs to associate neighborhoods with an easy meal for years to come.
Report sightings early, not just emergencies.
Call CPW’s Montrose office at 970-252-6000 whenever you spot a bear, even if it’s just passing through or got into a trash can. CPW won’t trap and relocate a bear for a sighting alone, calling early lets them knock on doors and help neighbors remove attractants before things escalate. It also helps our community qualify for human-bear conflict grant funding, since CPW says a lot of activity goes unreported because people assume it’s not worth calling in until a bear needs to be moved.
Relocation is a last resort. It takes significant staff time, and dropping a bear into unfamiliar territory forces it to compete with other bears for food and space, which is hard on the animal. CPW would rather work with residents to prevent conflict from reaching that point in the first place. So the moment to call isn’t after a bear has broken into your garage twice, it’s as soon as you notice one lingering, returning several times in a week or getting into trash or another food source.
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