Bear 104 wasn’t always in trouble – she was almost always in trouble. She walked through campgrounds and hung out on roadsides near Cody in the early 1990s. Neither was a good place for a grizzly bear. She inevitably ended up near people despite several relocations. Today, her future would have been uncertain. A grizzly bear isn’t generally allowed to walk through campgrounds year after year. But, the early ’90s was a different time, said Mark Bruscino, former large carnivore section supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
Grizzly bears were on the endangered species list, and their numbers seemed to be dropping. They were hit by cars or killed when they spent too much time around people.
Bear 104 had more cubs than any other grizzly in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. She was critical to boosting numbers.
It fell to grizzly bear managers like Bruscino to keep bears like 104 out of trouble, alive and reproducing. He and other wildlife biologists spent night after night scaring bears away from lodges, pelting them with rubber bullets to keep them off roadways and sometimes running after them on foot in the dark to keep them from Dumpsters.
Barb Franklin, a former wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, remembered a multiday vigil she and Bruscino kept in a popular campground outside of Cody. Bear 104 and her cubs killed a cow elk that had been wounded by a car and dragged it into the crowded campground. The two biologists cleared everyone out, closed the gate and then spent days telling people they couldn’t sneak around it to see the bears.
“It was a combination of taking care of the bears and public safety,” she said.
That was more than 20 years ago, before bear numbers climbed and petitions moved through the courts to try and remove them from the endangered species list. It was before gray wolves were reintroduced into Wyoming, protected and then removed from the list and mountain lion numbers exploded. Read more…..