The Day After
November 26, 2010 – 8:42 PM CST
The day after Thanksgiving. Back at work. Trying not to eat too many leftovers….
The highlights on this snowy day were delivery of the fish house to house the den cam equipment out in the woods, word from Bill Powers about technology advances PixController will be using for Lily and Hope’s Den Cams, and the arrival of Engineer Jim Stroner to test cell phone signals in the den area tomorrow.
At the Bear Center, Honey was busy rearranging leaves, moss, and pine needles in her den, just like we will likely see Lily and Hope doing from time to time.
We saw the newspaper articles about Bozo the 17-year-old bear being shot in Pennsylvania. The point that stands out to us is that this thoroughly habituated and food-conditioned bear (using the jargon words of professionals) became one of Pennsylvania’s older bears. Yet, when it was killed at a more advanced age than most bears are killed in Pennsylvania, wildlife officials blamed the killing on Leroy Lewis, who is pictured with Bozo a couple years ago.
One article began, “Leroy Lewis stood in the doorway of his tiny mobile home in Bushkill on Monday evening and wept as a Pennsylvania Game Commission officer told him his beloved bear, Bozo, had been shot by a hunter. Seventeen years of memories filled Lewis' mind as he digested the news that Bozo was dead.”
Lewis began feeding Bozo at his rural home when the bear was very young. The big bear became well known and welcomed in the area. Residents told of feeding the bear out the back door of a restaurant and at a nearby resort.
The big bear was also known to David Price and his five hunting companions who had hunted the bear for years. Hunting in the woodlots of Pennsylvania is typically done with bear drives. That means a line of people flush bears toward people waiting at the far edge. This year, members of the Price hunting party spotted the bear, made phone calls to gather the group of six, and shot Bozo six times as he emerged from a woodlot. Bozo reportedly weighed 879 pounds and was the heaviest bear ever killed in Pennsylvania.
The killing brought a public uproar from locals who knew the gentle giant.
We wondered why one of Pennsylvania’s oldest bears became vulnerable this fall after avoiding hunters for so many years. This fall, a wildlife official gave Lewis a written warning to stop feeding Bozo, and he did. Did Price’s hunting group just get lucky? Or did Bozo change his travel patterns this fall because Lewis was forced to stop feeding Bozo in the weeks before the bear hunt?
After the killing, wildlife officials ignored the fact that Bozo was one of Pennsylvania’s oldest bears when they blamed Lewis for contributing to the death by feeding him. One wildlife official said, “That’s what happens when people feed bears, they get shot.”
We say, given Bozo’s 17 years, a more objective statement would be, “Most bears in hunted populations end up shot at ages far younger than Bozo.”
When it comes to feeding bears, whether people believe it is right or wrong, there is a need for scientific objectivity if people are ever to truly learn the pros and cons. Honest research is needed to replace opinions with facts.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center