How Montana’s Swan Valley is turning the tide on problem bears
The Swan Valley, hugged tight by trees and mountains, is home to people and bears, and the local community is looking to keep it that way. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE GRIZZLY BEAR COLLECTIVE
A bear’s nose knows when the smell of food wafts through the air. It’s integral to their survival, this tool for finding food, and is the reason why one resident of Montana’s Swan Valley has made it her summer’s work to pick up other people’s trash.
Kathy Koors has spent nearly 40 years living near Condon, Montana, in a pocket of the Treasure State defined largely by water and trees. Larch, lodgepole, and Douglas fir mingle in dense stands around azure lakes squeezed between the Mission Mountains and Swan Range. It’s a place sprouting with new subdivisions and second homeowners, a place outdoor lovers flock to, and a place where grizzly bears abound.
After years of volunteering her time picking up trash along trails and in campgrounds and visiting with neighbors about ways to keep bears out of human spaces, Koors is working this summer as the new Swan Valley Bear Ranger. The position is one Koors took initiative to create and is a valuable partnership between the local community and state and federal agencies.
Ultimately, this effort in the Swan is an example of finding local solutions to the challenges that come with living among grizzly bears, and is the kind of proactive work members of the Montana Governor’s Grizzly Bear Advisory Council have emphasized as they draft a series of management recommendations that could guide how state officials oversee grizzly bear populations. The council, which is composed of 18 Montana citizens, convened July 21-22 in preparation for finalizing recommendations in August, and is accepting public input online at fwp.mt.gov/gbac.
The Bear Ranger
It started last summer, when a particularly visible sow grizzly was killed for getting into people’s trash, bird feeders, and breaking into buildings. She had three young cubs with her at the time, and beyond causing trouble herself, managers feared she was teaching her youngsters bad habits. Two of the three cubs were captured and now live in captivity at West Yellowstone’s Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center, while the third cub was never found.
The sow had been named “Windfall” by area residents, who enjoyed seeing her in the woods near their cabins.
“That first time this she-bear came close to our cabins, our barns, our garbage—we should have paid attention to what she saw, what she smelled. We should have thought about what she was thinking,” writes longtime Swan Valley resident Suzanne Vernon in an essay published by the “Missoulian” after the sow was removed. “We should have known she would die if our eyes weren’t tracking her nose. … It was easier to allow a grizzly to learn the wrong things, than it was for us to teach that beautiful sow how to do things right.”
Three additional grizzlies also died from human causes last year in the Swan, which is bisected for 90 miles by Highway 83: one bear a hunter mistook for a black bear, one was euthanized for repeated conflicts with humans, and one was hit on the highway. Koors says those four deaths were the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back—the Swan Valley community needed to act.
Trash is a common problem on the National Forest. Koors often finds partially burned food or plastic in fire rings and trash left at sites. PHOTOS BY KATHY KOORS
In 2007, when Koors was working for the since renamed Swan Ecosystem Center—now known as Swan Valley Connections—she helped launch a bear ranger program and for three years the organization was able to support in partnership with state and federal agencies a wildlife technician that patrolled campgrounds and checked residential trash. When faced with funding shortfalls in 2010, the program folded but in 2019 Koors was encouraged to start the effort anew.
Today, Koors’ position is housed under the Living with Wildlife Foundation with support from private donors, U.S. Forest Service, and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. She visits campgrounds and dispersed campsites over approximately 29 miles along the Swan River, cleaning up trash and visiting with campers, speaking about the ramifications of a soda can left on a picnic table or a corn cob thrown in the fire.
“A lot of folks, in my experience, will leave trash in a fire pit expecting someone else will burn it,” says Flathead National Forest wildlife biologist Mark Ruby. Ruby served as the bear ranger back in 2007-2010 and continues to work with Koors in her new-found position.
He says the program is valuable because having a single dedicated person that visits campsites on Fridays when campers are settling in, then again throughout the weekend to pick up trash, is a proactive step toward reducing conflicts. And it came at a time when COVID has sparked an increased interest in the great outdoors. “We’re keeping bears from becoming habituated and we’re also providing on-site resources and education to people so they can make good choices and recreate safely in bear country,” he says.
Olfactory woes
A black bear investigates a bear-resistant dumpster in Yellowstone National Park. NPS PHOTO
On a warm evening in mid-July—one of those ushered in on a cool Rocky Mountain breeze—Koors describes her work to me, talking on end about what it means to her. She recently collected two oversized garbage bags full of trash from a single campground in the Swan.
“I love to see bears, it just grabs your heart,” she says. Her voice is to-the-point, but I think I hear a smile crack through the phone. Koors is quick to add that there’s a difference between seeing a bear that’s wild and one that’s gotten too used to humans.
When a bear hangs around houses or campgrounds, she says it’s likely that bear is getting human foods and could become aggressive if it seeks out things like trash, bird feeders or dog food.
Oftentimes, these bears become what wildlife officials dub “habituated,” meaning they are used to humans, or “food conditioned,” meaning they have started to associate human development with food and are no longer seeking natural meals like carrion or berries. Food-conditioned bears may approach humans, damage property, or prey on domestic animals, and wildlife officials often respond by euthanizing the bear.
“We need to keep bears wild,” Koors says. “If we want to be able to see bears or know they’re living among us, it means we are responsible for keeping them safe and keeping them safe means not attracting them to dig in our gardens or lure them in with a bird feeder.”
Smell is a grizzly bear’s primary sense—more important to them than sight or hearing—and with millions of nerve endings lining a bear’s snout, its ability to smell is seven times greater than a bloodhound’s, which is about 300 times greater than a human’s. The late neurosurgeon George Stevenson described this in the early 2000s, noting that unlike a human, who has a visual map for how to get to the huckleberry patch, a bear thinks in terms of scent, directly following the perfume of huckleberries or tang of a carcass.
This heightened sense of smell means that a bear’s nose knows when a nearby camper is grilling brats or an upwind homeowner has set out garbage for curbside pickup. Most of the time this isn’t a problem—a bear that hasn’t ever eaten brats or dug through garbage won’t necessarily associate the smell with food—but if a bear stumbles onto grease-laden dirt by a dumpster, half-burned food in a campfire, or even bird seed swaying in a feeder in your yard, it’s likely that bear will learn to associate that smell with food and seek it out again in the future.
“It’s not that people do it on purpose,” Koors says about attracting bears to human areas. “Most people don’t know bears smell that way.”
Koors believes that with a little honest education, most people are willing to do things a little bit differently. Maybe that means putting up an electric fence around a chicken coop, using a bear-resistant trash container—and remembering to close the latch and refrain from putting it out on the street days before pickup—or planting flowers that attract hummingbirds instead of using hummingbird feeders. “There are ways to live with bears,” she says.
A shared responsibility
As is the case in many parts of Montana, all of the Swan is considered bear country. “In a valley like the Swan, private property and public land is all habitat,” Ruby says, adding that a bear that gets food at a campground could easily seek it out again in a residential neighborhood, and vice versa.
While Koors pays close attention to campgrounds, she also keeps an eye out for residential trash problems. And if she sees trash on the side of a road—or a trash container obviously busted into by a bear—she stops to clean it up. She encourages residents to take advantage of Swan Valley Bear Resources’ bear-resistant trash container loan program, which also happens to be free, and she volunteers to help residents clean up other attractants around the yard as well.
Luke Lamar, the conservation director for Swan Valley Connections, says it’s partnerships like the bear ranger program or trash container loan system that truly help a bear-wise community succeed. “There’s no one-size-fits-all template that works for every community,” he says. “But there are some things that are similar in all communities and one of those is trash. Certainly, it takes partnerships, everyone working together, neighbors talking to neighbors.”
It’s programs like these that are the kind of community-driven solutions the Grizzly Bear Advisory Council has discussed during meetings throughout the past year.
“The council has continuously placed a high importance on getting more boots on the ground, creating permanent positions for bear conflict technicians, and empowering local watershed groups to be involved in their communities and local areas through cost share agreements, grants, and more streamlined communication and sharing of information,” says council member Jonathan Bowler, who lives in the Swan and works as an FWP state park technician. “We all agree that there is a need to share the responsibilities of grizzly bear conservation, education, and outreach among all stakeholders and communities where grizzly bears currently exist or are likely to in the near future.”
Certainly, with a little neighborly spirit, communities can find solutions to the challenges that come with bears. As the familiar African proverb goes, “It takes a village to raise a child.” So too, does it take a village to successfully live around bears.
Jessianne Castle is a freelance writer and editor and founder of the Grizzly Bear Collective (grizzlybearcollective.com), a company exploring how powerful storytelling can inspire thoughtful conversations about grizzly bears.