Feral Cities (19 page)

But if Lake Tahoe's towns and cities sound like a bear paradise of Dumpsters overflowing with free pizza, there's a big downside. Urban bears die young. Of the twenty-two bears tracked by scientists in the Lake Tahoe Basin, twelve lived in urban areas. By the age of ten they were all dead, while six of the rural bears were still alive and kicking.

Vehicle collisions are the main killer, responsible for not only the deaths of many adults but also the high rates of cub mortality among urban bears. An added danger is that bears looking for food in urban areas run into trouble with people and get killed. What's more, the urban bears are dying faster than they can reproduce, making their population reliant on newcomers moving in from the country.

For the black bears of Lake Tahoe, the city is a siren song, luring them in with the promise of a more-than-you-can-eat buffet before sending them to an early grave. It's not the same everywhere. The extreme heat and dryness of the Lake Tahoe area seems to make the city extra attractive for black bears, but in more hospitable climates they use cities differently. In Aspen, Colorado, the bears are nomads. In years where bad weather makes food scarce in the wild they head for the city, but when times are good they return to their natural habitat.

Black bears may be the bear fondest of city life, but grizzly bears, which are brown and about twice the size of the black bear, also dabble, and one of the places they visit is the town of Banff in Alberta, Canada.

“In the summer we've always got bears cruising around,” says
Parks Canada's Blair Fyten when we meet on a cold, snowy January morning. “We've got lots of grizzly bears here and a lot of them are very used to people. We have a few grizzly bears that will go right through the town. People see them from their yards.”

Three grizzlies, in particular, are regular summer tourists, he adds in a tone so matter-of-fact it hardly feels like we're talking about an animal with such a fearsome reputation. Two are six-hundred-pound males. The other, a female who had three cubs in tow when she last visited. But it isn't garbage that's bringing them to the picturesque national park town.

“Our garbage in the townsite is pretty good. All our containers are bear proof, although every once in a while you get a restaurant that spills some grease or something. So the bears aren't really getting into the garbage, but they might come into town and go for a crabapple tree in someone's yard or to graze down on the golf course.”

There's another reason the grizzlies come to Banff, and it's the same reason I'm here. Elk. For years Banff has had a problem with these large herbivores. At its peak in 1999, the town was full of them. “We were getting a lot of elk here, upward of six, seven hundred,” says Blair. “They tended to congregate around the townsite during certain periods of the year. One is when they are calving. The cows come into the townsite to seek refuge from predators and have their calves in people's backyards.”

But calving elk don't like people getting near them, and in a tourist town of eight thousand residents that can attract enough summer visitors to swell the population to as many as twenty-five thousand people, the chances of someone getting too close are high. “They get very protective of those calves, and so if you happen to step out into your backyard, sometimes the females would get aggressive and actually attack you, strike with their front feet. Then in the fall, the bulls would gather up their harems of cows and they get pretty protective of their cows too. So they would be right in town on the recreation areas and people would be there trying to
get pictures, and these bulls would get aggressive and put the run on the people.”

Banff didn't always have elk. Their presence is the unexpected outcome of actions half a century ago. In the 1960s Parks Canada had a culling program that wiped out the local wolves and killed many of the local cougars. With their natural enemies gone, the elk population boomed. The elk then ate all the willow trees, wiping out the local beavers. The caribou also lost out to the elk.

By the 1980s, however, attitudes to wildlife had changed. The culling of predators was stopped and the wolves staged a comeback. “The wolves come pretty close to town but stay two, three kilometers out,” says Blair. “For some reason they don't come in real close.” So the elk responded to the return of the wolf by moving into the town.

And although wolves pushed the elk into town, plants pulled them in. “The town acts as a refuge for the elk, plus there's lots of good vegetation. They come into town and eat on the manicured lawns. They really like the golf course too. And after they've hung out in town for a long period, they become habituated to people.”

Sometimes the elk's taste for what people plant in their gardens gets them into trouble. “A couple of weeks back we had a bull elk that got wrapped up in a whole bunch of Christmas lights. He was probably eating under someone's tree that had a bunch of lights on it, lifted his head, and found himself all wrapped up,” says Blair.

“We thought there was a risk he is either going to get caught up in a tree and die or get the lights wrapped around his legs, which could cause injuries. So we went in and darted him. We ended up removing his antlers because he was going to be dropping them in two months anyway.” The bull's sawed-off antlers, complete with Christmas lights in the shape of candy canes, are still on the floor of Blair's office when I visit.

By the end of the 1990s the elk had become a big problem for Banff. Every year there were more than a hundred incidents
involving aggressive elk, including seven where the animals made physical contact with people.

Blair takes me for a tour around town, pointing out places where elk have posed problems. Along the way we pass Central Park, a small park next to the Bow River and on the edge of downtown Banff. “There was a picture that somebody took where there are four or five people standing lined up behind this tree in Central Park, and on the other side of the tree is this huge bull who had gotten them at bay,” he says as we pass the park.

The next stop is the outdoor area of the elementary school. It is surrounded by a sturdy metal fence. “We used to get a lot of elk on this little playing field here, so we fenced it all off.”

Blair drives a bit further down the street. As we go we catch glimpses through the trees bordering the street of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which cuts through the town. “We've got elk and deer that are eating the grain that's been dribbled out on the tracks from leaky trains. If a train stops for whatever reason and is leaky, we end up with a big pile of grain there and that attracts bears, elk and deer.”

Do they get hit by the trains? I ask.

“Yes, they do. Especially in the wintertime. We've probably already lost eight elk this winter because a bit further down the tracks there's nowhere for them to step off the tracks, so they will run down the tracks and the train will just run them over. They report all the strikes to us so we can go out and find those elk. Sometimes they are still alive and we have to put them down, but we also collect the carcass if we can because it's just going to attract wolves onto the track.”

Over on the Fairmont Banff Springs Golf Course there are more fences, this time protecting the putting greens from the elk. “They get tens of thousands of dollars in damage to the fairways from the elk because in the fall, when the bulls are rutting, they will use their antlers to dig up a lot of the turf. If you want to watch bulls in
rut, sparring and stuff, this is where you go.” In winter, when snow stops the golf, the elk are free to roam, but in the summer the golf course staff chase them off each morning in golf carts and use the sprinkler system to try to scare them off.

Blair takes me to the scene of the incident that was the catalyst for the counterstrike against the elk invasion. It's a quiet backstreet of neat houses, close to a wall of conifer trees hiding the railroad tracks behind them. “I was pretty new to the warden service here and I was the person on call that day,” says Blair. “I got a call to go to an incident where a female elk had stomped a little boy in the backyard. The boy got bruised up, but nothing broken, just really scared.”

When Blair got there the father was waiting. “The ambulance had come and picked up the boy but the father was sitting in the street, waiting for one of us to show up. His veins are all bugged out on his neck and his fists are clenched and he comes up to me yelling, about this far away,” he says, indicating a gap that would have put him and the angry dad nose to nose.

“I thought this guy is going to hang a licker on me. He was saying, ‘It's about time we started doing something about these elk.' It was after that that they formed the Elk Advisory Group to come up with solutions.”

Core to the eventual solution was a two-part crackdown on the elk. First, a couple hundred elk were trapped and relocated hundreds of miles away. The elk that remained found themselves the target of a daily routine of “hazing,” essentially a concerted effort to scare them out of town.

Now each morning and evening Parks Canada patrols the town for elk and frightens away any they find. “We have different techniques for how we haze them. The most basic is just a hockey stick with a garbage bag or a flag tied on the end. You wave the stick and chase them off with that. It works because holding that hockey stick up with a garbage bag on the end, flapping, makes you look bigger.”

The hockey stick originated in Parks Canada's daredevil solution to elk raising calves in Banff backyards. “We would go in and grab those calves and move them to a safer location with Mum hot on your heels. So somebody would pick the calf up and run with it, but you had a partner with you who had the hockey stick because that cow was maybe a meter or two behind you wanting to strike you with her feet.” As the calf thief ran, the colleague would use the hockey stick to keep the angry cow at bay until the calf had been dropped in a suitable location.

Hockey sticks with garbage bags only frighten elk for so long, however. “Over time they get used to that, but we can up the ante. We have a paintball gun that shoots chalk balls that vaporize into powder when they hit something. We use those to hit the elk to direct them or to hit the trees alongside them to direct them off.”

And when paintball guns aren't enough, they turn to rubber bullets. The rubber bullet is a British military invention, developed for use in riots in Northern Ireland as a form of nonlethal ammunition that could be used to inflict pain but no injuries. They proved more dangerous than the British government claimed when it started using them in 1970, resulting in deaths and injury when fired at close range or at the wrong part of the body or in a way that caused the rubber-coated rounds to ricochet off the ground.

“They will penetrate an animal if you hit them in the abdomen instead of the muscle mass, but now they've come out with these rubber bullets that are really pliable and soft. You could get a penetration still if you shot really close into the abdomen.” But when used properly it's an effective tool for getting elk to move on. “When we started this program the elk were a little more reluctant to move, but now they know the program. It's ‘Oh yeah. Here comes that guy with his stick. Time to get out of here. I don't want to get a rubber bullet in the ass.'”

The same equipment is also used to get rid of grizzly bears. “If we get a report of a bear in the townsite then we do the same thing—we will go out and haze it off,” says Blair. When it comes
to grizzlies, hockey sticks are out of the picture—it's straight on to paintball guns and rubber bullets backed up with shotguns as the weapons of last resort. But often words and handclaps are all it takes.

“You can get behind a couple of these bears, like the female with the cubs. You can literally get behind her, thirty meters away, and go ‘HEY, BEAR! HEY, BEAR!' and clap, and she just keeps moving ahead of you. Once we get her out to a safe area, we've got these little pistols that shoot cracker shells and bangers, and we use those to move the bears.”

Bears and some elk have become so wary of Parks Canada patrols that they now move before they've even got the hazing gear out of the truck. “We tend to drive white trucks, and we've noticed that when we're doing hazing on bears they get to know the white trucks are not good, so they see the white truck and move off,” says Blair. “The elk are somewhat like that too. You pull up and they see you getting your hockey stick or whatever out of the back, and they are already down the road.”

The hazing strategy, combined with regular culls, has been delivering the goods. Today elk numbers in Banff are down to about 270, and the number of reported incidents have slumped from more than a hundred in 1999 to around sixteen a year. Encounters where elk make physical contact with people are down to four or less a year.

Keeping the elk in check also helps lower the risk that mountain lions or bears will end up roaming the streets, adds Blair. “The elk are pulling predators into the town. The wolves aren't coming in, but our cougars definitely come into town to kill an elk, and if you get some kid walking to school who bumps into a cougar or bear with a dead elk, that's a problem.”