When there isn’t enough food in the wild, Colorado residents can expect bears to come to town looking for food.
But this can lead to conflicts with humans and bears being euthanized, said Stewart Breck, a wildllife ecologist with the National Wildlife Research Center.
While studying bears in Aspen, he reasoned that limiting the amount of human food available to bears could help stop the cycle.
“We have tried to attack it from the angle of cleaning up town. That solution seems like a long-term fix to the problem and it means we don’t have to kill a lot of bears...But it’s proving very difficult to get people to change their behavior,” he said.
He did not have success with a public awareness campaign in Aspen, but his research lead to the study in Durango, which is looking into the effectiveness of bear-proof trash cans.
It’s a strategy that makes intuitive sense, but it hadn’t been tested, Breck said.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife gave away 1,100 free trash cans in 2013, but only 50 percent of homeowners are using them, said Heather Johnson, a biologist who is leading the study.
Even though the compliance rate is disappointing, she said the cans made a difference, compared to those areas where the trash cans were not distributed.
The difference was not apparent in the first year of the study, but the researchers noticed fewer incidences of trash cans raided by bears in the following years, she said.
The researchers also plan to analyze the calls to Colorado Parks and Wildlife to see if that reflects a decline in conflicts between bears and humans.
mshinn@durangoherald.com
