A homeowner in Whiteshell Provincial Park is concerned about an increase in nuisance bears rummaging through non-resistant garbage bins since summer.
Ainsley Houndle, who’s been living at West Hawk Lake in southeastern Manitoba for a decade, said she’s seen more bear activity over the last few years, including a bear eating from bins over a week ago close to a schoolyard in the community.
“Thankfully my kids don’t walk to school, but having a garbage and recycling depot somewhat close to the school, we’re just encouraging possible encounters. We know that wildlife encounters are always a possibility where we live, but I don’t think we need to be adding that extra worry as parents or just community members,” Houndle said Sunday.
Her family saw another bear feasting on garbage at the bins near her home in early July.
“We were able to watch him in action, opening the lids, helping himself, closing it, going into the next one, taking a bag into the forest, that sort of thing,” she said.
She thinks the issue has worsened since the province removed its wooden or wire cages that protected bins and prevented bears from accessing garbage.
Initially, a provincial waste management worker would unlatch the closure and manually transfer the trash to a garbage truck until newer bins were installed which made it easier for garbage trucks to pick up the bins.
The work may be less physically demanding, but the bins aren’t efficient at keeping the bears out.
The province was not able to provide a comment to CBC on Sunday. Houndle said she first contacted the provincial government about the issue in May last year.
“I think the response from the province is ‘be careful, they’re going to be more active in the fall,’ but it’s been happening all summer and it’s not the first summer that this has been happening. So to say that it’s just a fall occurrence or that it’s going to get worse, I don’t know if it can get worse than it is already, to be honest,” she said.
Houndle doesn’t know if bringing back the wooden or wire cages is the right solution, but she wants the province to fix the problem. The bears often scatter garbage around the bins and drag any remaining litter or food sources into the forest — a mess that provincial parks staff are called to clean up regularly.
She said people in community Facebook groups will post to warn others about bear sightings around the South Shore at Falcon Lake and to be cautious when throwing bags out because the four-legged animals will hop inside bins.
“We’re really not preserving or you know, conserving, we’re habituating the bears in the park. And, you know, we’re told to be bear smart … but we’re not removing the food source for them,” Houndle said.
“At some point, someone is going to get hurt and we already know that bears have probably been hurt because of this too, right?” Houndle said.
In the summer she noticed a few bear traps between bins near Star Lake and West Hawk Lake.
According to the provincial report Coexisting with Black Bears, “relocating or destroying bears does not resolve the problem unless the food sources are also removed.”
The province also told homeowners and cottagers in the report to secure garbage in a place where bears can’t access it such as a bear-resistant container or building or with electric fencing.
“In drought years, the berry-producing trees, bushes, they don’t have a lot of yields in terms of fruits, so another potential source that the bears normally get might be short. And so there’s a number of factors like that that might drive them into communities more often,” Jim Duncan, a retired biologist in Manitoba said.
He said bears are “extremely interested” in eating a lot of food during this time of year to put on fat ahead of winter hibernation.
“All it can take is one feeding at a spot and the bears kind of say ‘geez, that was a good deal. I’m going to keep looking for more of that,'” he said.
Duncan said the best thing people can do to prevent bears from getting into trouble is by removing any attractants like pet food or bird feeders near homes, keeping barbecues clean and not leaving garbage outside