Rangers Say Black Bears Poaching Less Food in Yosemite

Black bear warning sign in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. Image Credit eCanadaNow

Yosemite National Park, California – the popular tourist destination known for its lush green scenery, clean rivers, Mirror Lake, and multiple camping sites, is also home to a black bear population accustomed to poaching food from campers. No one knows the exact number of the bear population, but with four million annual visitors, there’s plenty of opportunity for bears to find free food. In fact, there are some bears which subsist on nothing but the food they have purloined from unsuspecting visitors.

Bear-related food theft spiked in 1998 with 1,584 incidents occurring that year alone. Park rangers then decided to enact stringent rules dictating how food is to be stored and secured. While it may be inconvenient for visitors, it has proven successful. Rangers now report that the number of bear incidents has dropped by 63% in the 14 years since the stricter rules went into effect. It is not without a financial cost though. The park spends half a million dollars annually for the supplies and outreach efforts designed to prevent bears from drawing close to campers in search of food.

A report in the March issue of the journal called “Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment” concludes that the percentage of a bear’s diet stemming from human food is 13%. Comparatively, this puts the black bear diet back to where it was during the years 1915 to 1919. It also indicates that the trend is for bears to revert back to a natural diet. Indeed, humans are to blame for the black bears’ reliance on anthropogenic food IE food from human sources. In the past, Yosemite operated areas for public feeding of the local animal life which only encouraged bears to acquire a taste for human food. The park also operated a trout hatchery which brought the bears in for quasi-trout buffets.

Source:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0304/Bears-stealing-fewer-picnic-baskets-at-Yosemite