Dear Editor:
I read the letter from Mr. Martin Dale, Bear Threats Are Being Ignored (North Shore News, Nov. 13) with much interest, concern and disappointment. I can only assume that the writer is a relatively recent resident to the North Shore because the North Shore News, over the last decade and beyond, has gone well above normal expectancy in helping to raise the level of public safety and informing their readers how to become bear wise. Help has also been given by other media to help achieve public safety with urban bears.
Mr. Dale refers to himself as becoming one of the increasing number of victims of bear intrusions yet appears not to accept that he is a source of attracting bears into his neighbourhood. The complainant, knowingly or not, has increased the risk of the presence of bears to his locality by keeping one of the main attractants for bears - beehives.
He seems to think that bears are a great risk to public safety. Fortunately for us, they present only a moderate risk with an average human injury over a 10-year period of three injuries per year in the entire province of British Columbia. We humans are a much greater risk to ourselves with our motor vehicles and weaponry.
It must be very discouraging to conservation officers - of which there are actively only about 100 in the entire province - to have to respond to people who have made no attempt at all to do their "homework" about how to respect the wildlife that we, on the North Shore of Vancouver, are still privileged to experience. At this particular time, there have been 12 black bears killed on the North Shore because of public ignorance about wild life attractant management.
Relocation of a bear does not work if it has become habituated (addicted) to easy food sources such as bee hives and unmanaged human foods, including garbage. The bears will return to the easy food sources. Bears must experience at least one week without food to trigger the hibernation impulse. If food is made available to them, they will not hibernate despite very low temperatures. Such bears usually have to be killed.
Bees are a very welcome asset to many who are gardeners, and so too are wasps and hornets. The wasp and hornets, unlike bees, are carnivorous, but do an excellent job at eating very small creatures such as blight that the bees will ignore. However, the nests of all three will attract bears. The bears will eat the hornets' nests, and that will be the end of that attractant, but beehives are a very much different challenge as Mr. Dale clearly explained in his letter to the editor.
Bears can be made to stay away from bee hives with the correct application of an electric fence.
Mr. Dale at the end of his letter states "Perhaps I am deluded." Well, perhaps we can change that, by extending a very cordial invitation to him to attend a meeting of the North Shore Black Bear Network and meet a conservation officer in person. Meetings are held almost every third Wednesday of the month, in the morning at the B.C. Parks Office, Mount Seymour Rd., North Vancouver.
Tony Webb, Chair North Shore Black Bear Network www.northshorebears.ca
