you
welcome everyone and thanks for joining today's presentation on creating Bear
wise community partnerships my name is Brian Faehner and I'm with the National
Park Service and help support our connected conservation effort the
connected conservation webinar series focuses on how NPS staff and partners
can use various tools and strategies to conserve natural cultural and recreation
resources at the landscape level working with Gateway communities outside parks
is critical to landscape scale conservation and as such our webinar
series is exploring the numerous opportunities to partner with
communities to further conservation you can register for future webinars in our
series and view past recordings by going to the network for landscape
conservation website or our internal National Park Service Connect a
conservation toolkit and there are links to both of these resources and the chat
box throughout the presentations feel free to plug in questions into the
questions box we'll look at everyone's questions following the presentation
we will post a recording of today's webinar following the presentation and
as a reminder our webinar series is open to federal and state agencies nonprofits
and other conservation partners so feel free to invite your colleagues to future
webinars we have four presenters with us today
Linda Masterson is the author of the book living with there's a practical
guide to bear country the book has become a bear reference book of choice
for wildlife agencies biologists Parks Force communities and people trying to
live more responsibly with theirs Livan Ewing is the owner and Managing
Partner of the image resources and pixie Jack's
press sixty Jack's press is the independent book publisher that has been
producing environmental nonfiction bestseller since 1995 Dan Gibb serves as
the Tennessee Wildlife resource agencies black bear program leader and chairs the
bear wise program I'm sorry to embarrass Dan but in nineteen twenty seventeen he
was named the wildlife biologist of the Year by the South Eastern Association of
Fish & Wildlife agencies still stiver is a supervisory biologist at the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park where he oversees the
parks wildlife management program including black bear management wild hog
control bat research and monitoring and elk research and monitoring Linda LaVon
Dan and Bill the floor is yours thank you Brian and I want to thank
everybody for joining us today today we're going to introduce you to those of
you that may not be familiar with Great Smoky Mountains National Park we want to
introduce you to the park and the bears the parks bear management program we
want to give you some background on our partnership with the Tennessee Wildlife
Resources Agency particularly as it relates to bear management and we want
to share how this partnership is helped foster you know a community task force
to address human bear conflicts and lastly we want to introduce you to bear
wise and how it can help you with some similar efforts so Great Smoky Mountains
National Park is located on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina it's
about 800 square kilometers inside our square miles in size if you look at this
map here you can see there's a lot of force land the Forest Service land to
the south and to the north but on the Tennessee side here in blunt severe
County it's all it's all private land of course the Smokies is known for its
spectacular views in its biological diversity more than 19,000 species have
been identified in Great Smoky Mountains National Park it also provides a lot of
recreational opportunities there's ten front country campgrounds over a hundred
backcountry campsites over 800 miles of hiking trails including 74 miles of the
Appalachian Trail now the park is located in very close proximity to a
majority of the u.s. population within within a day's Drive of many of the
people that live in the eastern United States so we have a lot of visitors in
fact last year we had 12.5 million visitors to Great Smoky Mountains
National Park we also have a lot of bears the current bear population is
estimated to be about 1,600 that's about two bears per square mile it's one of
the highest densities in North erricka and that estimate comes from
research done by the University of Tennessee dr. mike pelton started
studying bears here in the Smokies in late 60s so we have one of the longest
ongoing bear research programs in the world so that combination of sixteen
hundred bears and 12.5 million visitors we do have quite a few in human bear
conflicts now our partnership with TWRA actually stems back way back to the 50s
when the park actually first started doing wild hog control wild hogs
historically were a big game species in Tennessee in North Carolina and very
politically sensitive species so we had agreements to actually trap hogs
donating them to the states and relocate them out onto public lands that were
open to hog hunting over time that that agreement changed and now we work
cooperatively and we're part of Tennessee's wild hog eradication action
team and you can see here there's lots of other partners on that Action Team to
eradicate hogs from the state of Tennessee we've worked with TWRA on a
lot of other projects including white-tailed deer restoration in East
Tennessee back in the early 80s peregrine falcon hacking barn owl
augmentation river otter reintroductions and more recently we're part of the
tennessee bat working group which is an effort to coordinate the conservation of
bats in tennessee with respect to black bears we worked with TWRA and tennessee
bear and boar association to actually reintroduce bears into the Big South
Fork National River and Recreation Area which is also a National Park unit and
although we only reintroduced 27 bears from the Smokies up to the Big South
Fork that population is now thriving we have a long relationship with TWRA on
black bear research in fact much of the research done by dr. mike pelton was
also supported by TWRA currently we're working with TWRA as well as the state
of North Carolina Georgia South Carolina and Kentucky to come up with a regional
black bear population estimate and this is all part of the work of the
southern Appalachian black bear study group we've also worked together to
provide a lot of variety of training and workshops over the years we hosted her
co-hosted bear attack response training we've done chemical and mobilization
training eastern black bear workshop and most recently the 2018 human bear
conflicts workshop of course we have a long partnership in dealing with human
bear conflicts both in and out of the park and with with in respect to the
park we do have bear proof containers throughout the park
mostly dumpsters and as you can see even on some days it's hard to contain all
the trash that 12.5 million people bring to this to this park we have a lot of
education material we have a strong education component to our bear
management program as well as law enforcement and we have a almost an army
of volunteers supporting both the education aspect of a bear management we
even have food storage cables at all of our backcountry campsites and in fact
when installed and maintained properly it's never been defeated by a bear and
you can see this bear here at spence field shelter a few years ago trying to
get some of these food that was hung but nonetheless we still actively managed a
lot of bears in fact we over the last ten years we have handled about 50 bears
a year through the human bear conflicts unfortunately we have a cooperative
agreement with TWRA as well as Cherokee National Forest and this agreement
allows us to provide mutual aid and assistance to each other in managing
bears in our region and this might include sharing equipment using rehab
facilities such as the Appalachian Bear Rescue and when necessary relocating
bears out into Forest Service land in fact we relocate about ten bears per
year out on the Forest Service land
thank you Bill so I'm going to spend just a few minutes kind of bringing in
what bill just gave you the background wise as to what's going on outside the
park boundaries along the Tennessee side and once again here's another picture of
Gatlinburg and you can see how it's nestled in and around the park and I do
one before I get going just make the point that we deal with a lot of issues
in these gateway communities that surround the res it you know the
year-round residents things such as garbage bird feed dog food things like
that the same issues a lot of other people deal with we we have those issues
as well in these communities but today we're
kind of focusing on the impact that tourism seems to have and some of the
challenges related to that so with that I'll kind of go into this so any given
weekend for most weekends out of the year this is what you're going to see if
you're looking in the Pigeon Forge with the park to your back all these people
coming in they'll just mention you know twelve and a half million people a year
are coming to the park and there's even more than that coming into this this
general area because a lot of people come into these gateway communities but
they never even set foot in the park these communities are actively trying to
make these year-round destinations whether it be a New Year's Eve party and
Gatlinburg or car shows and in Pigeon Forge or for July parades whatever it
may be there's that there's always something going on and if you're not
looking for one of these organized events you've got things like this that
are available to you 365 so whether or not people are coming to this area to
some of those specific attractions or they are coming to get into the park
there is a common denominator that they all have and that is they need somewhere
to stay they're gonna come down here it's been anywhere from more likely 48
72 hours maybe a little bit longer and they're gonna probably rent a cabin
a chalet maybe a hotel but a lot of rentals and these these chalets and
these cabins and and most of them are as you see in this picture there nestled
into the woods there's just a whole lot of cover that allows bears to move
around and obviously these areas are generating generating trash so this is
where many of our problems begin and weather I mean Park gets a bear it's in
the park right now we'll be in town tonight and vice versa and Bill's going
to talk a bit more about that here in a minute but these kinds of things do
impact what's going on in the park and lastly I mentioned this before I get it
back to Bill he mentioned Park visitation and here you can see the
number of visitors in the park on a monthly basis during 2019 and July as
you expect let it with 1.6 million people but you can see this red line
represents that from April through October there's over a million people
every month and and you're approaching a million in the month of November and
this is significant because this is the time of the year for us that bears are
most active and obviously some time periods a little bit less activity than
others when your natural food sources such as soft massed and hard master are
available but it's a very busy time for for personnel dealing with bears and all
the people and I'll just kind of put it to this perspective think about this on
a weekly basis we're talking about between 250,000 and 400,000 people
coming into this region every weekend and most of them know nothing about
bears and and how do you deal with that and how do you educate these people and
roll this over from a week-to-week basis
thanks Dan so so the idea of a task force is really
nothing new for us in fact the task force the original task
force was formed back in June of 1989 and it was coined the problem bear task
force and I know a lot of folks on this call are our bear biologist you probably
cringing on that problem bear phrase but that's what it was back then but we know
it's human bear conflicts issues anyway the reason the group came together was
the gallon burg kalise department was dealing with a lot of bear issues in and
around the city and so they wanted to get together and kind of help try to
resolve what those issues were so the original group consists of the TWRA the
city of Galan Berg Park Service and of course the University of Tennessee Union
they discuss why'd bears were causing issues in and around the city and what
were those challenges another group came in as well the chalet village village
home Artists Association joined the group and there was one person in
particular and that Association that was really the catalyst to keep this group
going but over time and I will rest over time and that's one of the maybe one of
the take-home messages with forming a task force or something like that is
these things take time but finally finally in 2000 so 11 years later the
group was able to work with the city and come up with an ordinance that required
animal resistant garbage containers at the same time the Tennessee Wildlife
Resources Commission passed a proclamation in that same zone that
prohibited the feeding affairs and this is a map showing that zone and again
this map was identified based on the calls the cities the city was getting as
well as that sort of the concept that if they bear proof this area that hopefully
the Bears wouldn't move further out into the to the community one of the other
amazing things was the group was able to hire another position that was partially
funded by the city of Galan Berg partially funded by TWRA and partially
funded by one of our partners Great Smoky Mountains Association the group
also came up with some education material
the Association worked with a professional advertising company to
design this poster that was distributed throughout the that same zone so that so
the group accomplished quite a bit but over time the group sort of fizzled out
and sort of lost its momentum but in the meantime a couple few things happen one
the bear population went from an estimated four to six hundred to sixteen
hundred fairs park visitation went from eight point six million to twelve point
five million and the residents in severe County doubled and so we started seeing
more and more bear issues in recent years just an increasing trend and we
were also seeing bears with sort of advanced conflict behavior bears that
would just show up and tear into a building and or tear into a car and we
started wondering you know what effect if any development outside the park was
having on beary she's both in and out of the park so in 2015 we initiated a bear
GPS study where we put GPS collars on bears and we did we chose both bears
that were involved in conflict as well as bears that were in the backcountry
and we want to let the Bears to show us where we needed to focus our efforts in
2016 we brought the task force back together this time was called the
Gatlinburg bear task force and we had what we thought were all the right
players at the table city managers my superintendent we had a really good
group and we had a lot of momentum though and with that group but
unfortunately Ginny top fire hit in November of 2016 and we really lost all
of her momentum and again that's another take home a big events like that and
this pandemic can really set task force back a little bit and so you have to
have the folks in there that can keep that momentum going nonetheless the
study went on and we learned a lot and one of the big things we learned was the
home range sizes of some of the bears in the park particularly male bears this
this light blue area is the city ordinance and so and this would be in
the the large dark blue be in the home range and so not only in terms of the
city ordinance but the park as a whole and how much area these pairs were
covering and so this map shows some of the GPS locations of some of the bears
we get collars on and each purple dot is a GPS location and you can see they're
moving well beyond the zone as a matter of fact what we discovered is that over
90 percent of the male bears that we put GPS collars on are leaving the park and
going out towards the gateway communities and over 50 percent of the
female bears all right okay so to kind of bring this into a bigger picture and
and set you up for an introduction to bear wise
here's a map of Tennessee and our two primary bear populations and back when
that first task force that bill mentioned was developed the Bears in
Tennessee were in the green and for the most part they were in the southern
third of that area didn't have any bears at all and the upper northeast portion
of the state and since that time they've done very well populations have grown
and they're expanding and then bill mentioned the reintroduction efforts at
the Big South Fork back in the early 90s and the green represents that population
now and the Bears they're doing very well and I'll show you this map I'm not
getting into a lot of detail but this is just a short period of time in Tennessee
last year with sightings that were reported to us via the internet for
bears and it kind of gives you an idea of what we're dealing with in Tennessee
as far as bear populations expanding into former range and doing very well
and having to deal with a lot of people have never had bears in their backyard
before calling saying hey guess what I saw yesterday and this isn't unique to
Tennessee we're seeing this all over the southeast
and and really all over North America you talk to state biologists and they'll
tell you the same thing that they're seeing bears it's moving into areas that
they've not been in in a really long time or some cases that they've never
been in at all so the Southeast Association of both
agencies has multiple working groups one of the group's is the large combo
working group and myself and all the statewide coordinators are members of
this group and we we meet pretty regularly at least once a year and some
of us get to meet more often than that with that other group that I bill
mentioned the southern Appalachian black bear study group so we get to interact a
lot and we just been discussing how much time everybody is spending on these
human bear conflicts and trying to come up with the answers and the best way to
educate people and the best way to address some of these things and and we
kind of went back to what happened in the early 70s with the the original
southern Appalachian black bear study group and the realization that we needed
to look at these animals on a population on a large scale population level I
supposedly the way to say it rather than a local scale because you know bears
were moving back and forth from Tennessee to North Carolina they still
do so we needed to work a little bit closer on how we were going to address
these issues and we were very successful in that and so we got to just brainstorm
and said why shouldn't we be doing the same approach with this education
program so that's where their lies started so speaking and some of the
things that we wanted to do we wanted to have a good education program was
managed by state law agencies we've seen some information indicating that less
than 1% of people were going to their state wildlife agencies for information
regarding black bears and bear management and conflict issues and we
just felt like that was unacceptable and we wanted to try to change that dynamic
and we wanted it to be in brick and trusted as the go-to authority for a
black bear management and we also want consistency across the southeast and
what I mean by that is willing people whether they were in Tennessee or if
they traveled to Louisiana or traveled Louisiana to South Carolina or any of
these states that they would be seeing the same types of messaging in the same
brand and and know hey this is what I see at home I trust this resource so if
this is what I'm seeing when I'm in tents here around the Great Smoky
Mountain National Park then I'm gonna take it to heart and and
heed the advice that that I've been given so that's that's where we wanted
to go with it and so I did like talking and we came up with the bear wise
program and we've been very pleased with how that's gone and I'm not going to
steal any of Linda's thunder I'm gonna turn over here to her here in just a
minute but I did want to mention a couple of things that we did accomplish
on that other task force that phase two so to speak and one of them was this
place mat and we were just looking for something but in front of kids at
restaurants most restaurants you go to and at least here have placemats for
kids to color and do that to these weather waving our food was a great
opportunity to put an educational piece in front of them and that task force
along with a lot of help of the National Park Conservation Association managed to
get this pulled off and we're very pleased with it is on the website now
and it's actually turning to an activity booklet as well another thing we've done
more recently that I wanted to bring up is just the partnership with the Forest
Service bill mentioned for service a couple times Cherokee National Forest
specifically and they came to us and asked us to help them with a pairwise
message for their key ahsha's and and we put this together working with them and
it's got some specific things that they need to have in there regarding food
storage requirements on the national forests so we're excited to have these
out there and then most recently we've been working on this vacation tips and
Linda probably talk a bit more about this but you know this was designed
with this area in mind but we've already got it up on the website too because
we've seen that there's needs in other parts of the country for a similar
similar piece of information so back to this area here real quickly and then
we're going to give this over to Linda but the Gateway communities that Bill's
been talking about you know we we decided to start phase three of the task
force and we once again change the name and it's now the Smoky Mountains very
wellness community task force and you know Bill showed you the pictures of how
the Bears are moving and we've talked a whole lot about Gatlinburg and and we've
just come to the realization that even if you get gallon Berg completely
tightened up the way you want to be you've got all these other communities
that are having the same issues more so we saw a real need to expand this to all
the Gateway communities and we also saw a need to take another look at who the
partners are on this task force and you know when you're dealing with with fires
and things like coded 19 city managers have a lot of other things that can pull
their attention away and and that's understandable so we were concerned
about that and we were also just felt like that hey it's better to have your
people that are living and working your community to kind of take ownership of
this issue so they can take it and run with it and so now the committee the
task force rather is made up of business owners NGOs that are very active in the
area and then property owners and they represent different types of businesses
they represent different communities and now the National Park Service intensify
Wildlife Resources Agency we're kind of over here off to the side and we've got
this this line that we've drawn we're serving more as facilitators and
advisors and just trying to give these folks some direction and give some some
technical advice when they need it and and just give them encouragement and
we have opportunities that come to us that we feel like can be good for them
we're going to pass it on and I'll let them take the lead and run with it so
we've been very happy with what's going on with this group we were continuing to
work through the Cova 19 epidemic had several meetings and zoom and we're
continuing to make progress and bill and I are both very excited to see where
this group is going and with that I'm going to quit talking and let Linda
Masterson jump in here thank you Dan and bill so now let's take a look at what
makes their Y's unique and how you all can use their wives to reach out to
potential partners so why are all these black bear biologists grinning
ear-to-ear I'm pretty sure this was the moment they realized that the years
they'd spent working on creating a new kind of bear education program that
everyone could get behind has finally paid off because they're wise is a
program that professionals can trust and rely on because it's built on sound
science but their lies is also a program people will use because everything is
easy to find and easy to understand
helping people live responsibly with black bears and providing tools for
everyone trying to reach them that's what their lies is all about and that
has never been more important than it is right now people populations are booming
bear populations are growing and conflicts and problems are growing too
especially for the bears that live around Gateway communities
there were 328 million visits to national parks last year and according
to a new survey about a third of the people who plan to take a summer
vacation this year are heading to a national or a state park you can bet
most of those people will be staying in Gateway communities that means Perks
need help communities need help most of all bears need help there could not be a
better time for bear wise because one more thing you can bet on is that most
of those people aren't going to know much about bears and a lot of what they
think they know is wrong the bear wise website can provide the right answers to
the same bear question all day long from basics like what color is a black bear
how fast can they run what do they eat -
debunking all those black bear myths like a bear standing up is getting ready
to attack and adult the earth can't climb trees or how close is too close
and why can't I feed the bear to help there's a bear in my yard or in my
campground or my bird feeder or my car or on my deck you will find the answers
to all those questions and hundreds more on the bear wise website when everyone
puts all that information and all those resources to work we can go from this to
this we can keep people safe and we can keep bears wild their wives' org is
organized into five main sections people are fascinated with bears about bears is
our second most popular section
there's safety tips keep people and bears safe at home around town and
outdoors the bear wise basics give you a blueprint for preventing problems
community resources is focused on getting people to start working together
and the bear wise store has lots of tools that you can use we don't have
enough time today to go through everything you will find on the website
but I'm going to give you a quick overview of just a few the at home bear
wise basics help people understand the most common situations that create
problems and what to do to prevent them each basic has lots of information about
what why and how along with links to more resources bear encounters is our
most visited section and we always see traffic go up after there's been a bear
incident in the news the bear wife safety tips armed people with the
information they need to finish hunt hike and vacation safely to keep bears
out and to react the right way if they do encounter a bear the building bear
wise communities section has success stories sample anti seating ordinances
and lots of other ways to help get everyone pointed in the right direction
and the bear white store is full of free stuff these activity sheets for kids are
really popular and they are so much fun to do you barely realize how much you're
learning
you can download and print several flyers yourself for free or purchase
them in quantity from the Bayer wise store if Dan showed you word is
spreading about our new vacation tips flyer and we've worked with the Forest
Service to do that dual logo poster sized version of the outdoor safety tips
and also with the national parks and conservation Association to produce a
double-sided card sized version of the at home and outdoor bear wise basics
that they will be adding their logo to and mailing up to members in eight
states our weather resistant sticker their magnet with the bear wise basics
and the living with bears handbook are also all in the store and all purchases
help support their lives so who is using their lives in May alone we have more
than 16,000 pages agencies biologists interpreters media businesses parks
educators HOAs why are so many people with so many different wants and needs
all turning to bear wise it's because bear wise is where they all find common
ground what are people doing with these materials we require people to tell us
how they plan to use the materials they download or purchase here's just a taste
of what they're doing with them educating their mountain community
posting at campgrounds putting up in rentals publicizing in state magazines
and other publications emailing out the homeowners using to educate kids to
teach them to be bear wise basically it's what everyone of you working to
reduce conflicts has been trying to get people to do for years
users of Behr wise are from all over the person who downloaded the materials for
staff training and safety is actually from Canada what keeps people coming
back to bear wise it's easy it's easy to find what you're looking for and it's
easy to put that information to work
looking down the barrel eyes Road we hope it's going to be a very long road
and one of the real benefits of a web-based program is that it's also very
easy to add resources to add information to add ways to keep people engaged like
our new Z email bear alert you can sign up for them when you go visit the
website and even though there's a ton of information already on the site now we
all feel as if we've barely scratched the surface but bear wise is more than
ready to go to work for you so what's on your bear wish list you can use Behr
wise to open doors to get people together and talking to find those
common goals and those objectives everybody can agree on take a minute and
think about all the different types of people and businesses and organizations
that all have a stake in presenting problems and reducing conflict make a
list take a deep breath and start reaching out I was going to tell you
that once you start connecting with people you will be amazed at who starts
reaching back and just how much they can contribute but the Smoky Mountain bear
wise task force reached out to the media and they convinced the local NBC
affiliate they had a story that really needed to be told so now I don't have to
tell you I can show you
we're getting into one of the busiest times of year for run-ins between people
and bears it's a conflict that continues to grow especially in communities around
the Great Smoky Mountains 10 News reporter Jamie Feeney shows us people
are restoring a team to tackle this complex problem oh wow memory comes from
repetition and reinforcement in Gatlinburg Chalet village black bears
never forget how to land an easy meal I'll be honest it's trying at times
that's why I asked J guys always remembers to keep her garbage bear-proof
it's actually really easy you have a clip guy says bears quickly memorize the
mistakes people repeatedly making cabins and cars the craziest situation has been
getting six bears out of six different vehicles in the last four weeks alone
parent Chalet village it's not cute and funny it's a safety risk while the Bears
learn quickly places that surround the Great Smoky Mountains National Park have
very short memories cause new waves of millions of tourists repeatedly show up
with no prior knowledge of how to behave around bear how many times can you say
stay 50 yards away secure your trust I thought there's a dead bear you know
they all bear white faces so now the people who live and work
around the Smokies are teaming up to repeat something that helped in the past
by revamping a task force to make their communities what's called air watts the
Smoky Mountains paralyzed community John Force empowering the residents in front
that you can secure garbage take down feeders will come right down to safety
of people it's on all of us to coexist with the bears safely prevent bears from
getting hit on roads they don't care if you're honking the horn to your driveway
the conflict with bears not only affect homes it's bad for business
last year we probably had about a dozen visits from bears actually coming on to
our front porch all we need is just one bad accident and that could be
detrimental to a business or town what's driving these bears downtown and bottom
line it's coming down to food one goal of the task force is to enforce the
rules that are already in place that require bear proofing in parts of
Gatlinburg but also repeat those requirements in other areas because new
GPS studies show the animals travel great distances far beyond bear proof
zones to get to garbage you could bear proof one Street but if your neighbor is
not fair proof you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot and here's a
perfect example of that in Gatlinburg this is highway 321 on this side of the
highway you're in the zone that requires these bear resistant trash cans that are
hard for the animals to break into and the garbage is always greener on the
other side just have to cross the street to get out of that ordinance aw so fine
flimsy trash cans that are easy pickins what we're trying to do is to see if we
can spread those ordinances to where it impacts greater areas yellow bergs
ordinance was a proactive step a few decades ago but since then the number of
people living around the park has doubled the bear population has tripled
you got a lot more people we got a lot more bears and we got a lot more
visitors let's ask for seams to find more solutions make bear safety part of
everyone's collective memory something guy says we need stop repeating the
mistakes that inevitably killed this icon of the Smokies you know when the
bear breaks into a car a trash can a home it's not good news for the bear the
bear is often euthanize
hold ourselves accountable and ourselves and the ban in Gatlinburg Jim Matheny
wvi our news thank you you know when we were first asked to do
this webinar we assumed our audience would be mostly federal employees but
the registration list includes everyone from citizens groups and businesses
state agencies NGOs it is such a diverse audience really thought about that and I
think the one thing everyone has in common is bears bears bring people
together and they're wise makes it easy to find common ground and work together
to find common solutions so with that Brian I think we are ready for questions
sorry about that we're on mute fantastic guys thank you
so much for a great presentation we've got a bunch of questions coming in
here's the first one are there efforts like bear why's being deployed or being
developed in other areas of the country thank you Brian
this is Dan out I'll address that we've had that question come to us quite a bit
and I can say that we're in the process of working with Association Fish and
Wildlife agencies to expand it to to other parts of the country and we're
hoping that that's going to take that's going to happen hopefully in the next
few months by the end of the year there'll be some more opportunities for
folks to in other states to be able to utilize some of these things and then I
know that North Carolina is doing a lot of work as well with in the Asheville
area they've been doing a lot of radio collared bears with an urban an urban
type study that kind of goes really well with what we've done over here in
Tennessee in the park and so they got three active program in Asheville as
well fantastic here's another another one why is taking
a community approved preferable to focusing on individuals
I'm not sure what they mean by that question I'm going to I'm going to guess
like you know kind of getting a community like Gatlinburg together you
know the some of the folks together versus just kind of working at an
individual level you know with rather than the city of gallon burg
well I think we kind of alluded to it but you know it's just when you get the
community behind it it's really hard when you're dealing you know especially
from a state perspective when you're going around in an area where you have a
neighborhood and you're shy talk to one landowner at a time one homeowner at a
time and it's going to get them to change their behavior and sometimes
that's what it takes but in a situation where you're bringing in 12 and a half
million people a year into one two County two-and-a-half County area in
East Tennessee you gotta go at a bigger picture and and we all think that we're
to the surface with some opportunities here and you know we would like to start
looking at what you know we've had a couple people talk about Expedia and and
you know all these websites that hey is this a bear wise hotel that I'm looking
at renting for the weekend and there's a lot of options out there for us to
explore and but I just think it's like any other major change in human behavior
everybody's got to get on board and it takes time and and I just feel like we
all believe that going at the community approach shows buy-in by the residents
by the business owners and it's not a situation where they feel necessarily
that they're being mandated to do something it's it's it's more of a
voluntary type approach and I hope that addresses that question if it didn't
that person's more than welcome to contact one of us and we could talk
about it a little bit further well here's a somewhat related question is
there an effort underway to expand the bear safe ordinances around the Smokies
well again I think that's something that this group you know would as they come
together and and and have accomplishments that they would approach
different communities around the park to potentially implement something similar
that Gatlinburg has done again that was a pretty proactive
response by the city of Galan Bergen and they're still funding that position
that's a co-funded position to deal with human bear conflicts and and but yeah
that would be the goal would be to expand you know that the Bears
themselves showed us where we need to put our efforts and it's it's all those
gateway communities surrounding the park you know I had one of the things we're
talking about is just kind of going at at this at the the right pace and make
sure that you don't get the cart ahead of the horse so to speak because
the last thing you want these six gateway communities now have six
different types of ordinances that may or may not work together you know people
be confused and they move from one area to the other so that's another benefit
for the task force taking the lead and something like that is they can work
with those communities together and and throw out you know the ideal
circumstances and hopefully you know it's kind of a domino effect you know
the the hope is that if if one or two get on board the others will follow
great here's another one nothing was discussed regarding cost is
there a cost associated with this either for the community members or the agency
we're talking about once again that question is a little bit open-ended but
as far as the bear wise program itself it's currently being funded by the
southeastern Association Fish and Wildlife agencies and their operating
budgets so each year the directors designate a certain amount of money for
us to utilize for this program so that's what's paying for the bear wife's
program as he is right now we just recently lost that store that Linda
mentioned and we're expecting revenue from that and as we move forward with a
transition hopefully to a larger scale program we'll be looking at some other
mechanisms to help with funding of the program now as far as
pairwise programs and communities that's an outstanding question and it's a
question that I know everybody that's listening that works for state wildlife
agency is going to struggle with and and what I would say is each agency has its
own means to to generate revenue some for some of us it's easier than others I
would encourage people look at their partners you know these bear resistant
trash cans aren't cheap I will say I'll put a plug in for the city of Gatlinburg
I noticed yesterday they put 90 new bear resistant trash cans in over the fall
and they were in areas that we had really been asking for that to happen
and they listened to what was being said and and my calculation is that's almost
$100,000 and those trash cans so it isn't cheap but there are may be
lots of opportunities out there some other states like Florida have had
really good success with cost share programs with cities and communities and
in Tennessee we're looking at that as an option and I actually got an email from
another state biologist about an hour before we started inquiring about the
same type of thing that they're looking at doing so funding you just got to go
out there and and be resourceful and but the good thing is I guess it's a
good thing yes people typically are willing to put money towards bear
management it's not it's not a species that you have a hard time getting
interest in so and we've done studies in Tennessee that showed the general public
would get behind things like required very approved trash cans and things like
that in communities and it would be willing to fund them alright here's a
related question what advice would you give people looking to start to start
partnering and creating bear wise type programs well you need to be open to all
all partners all potential partners everybody like Linda said everybody
loves bears and but it needs to come to the table the
other piece of advice I would give is is to be patient and be persistent I was
actually at the first task force meeting in June of 1989 I'm still on it so some
of these things take time and hard work and you just got to stick it out here's
another one why is the park so committed to bear wise are there other options of
getting the same results well I can tell you that collaborating with state
agencies on bear wise community efforts are a high priority for the park
obviously bears are are an icon species to the park and protecting bears is
important to us so important that it's even in my performance standard this
year so so working with Dan and our communities and protecting bears is just
just a real high priority for us okay here's a comment there are similar
efforts with other regions of the country regarding bears the Rocky
Mountain West has black bear and grizzly bear programs how has this effort
coordinated with other regions outside the southeast well as I said earlier we
were the process of hopefully making that transition and I think the main
difference and and I mentioned it earlier is that this is a program that
is funded and and managed by the state wildlife agencies and to me it makes it
a little bit different because these are you know where the our agencies are the
ones that are doing with these issues on a day to day basis and we've got a lot
of left skin in the game so speak to see that these issues decrease and in some
cases hopefully go away and so as far as coordinating these
other states and these other programs it's going to be interesting as we move
forward and we've talked about that a little bit
that a lot of that information that we need especially if you bring in another
species into the discussion while that information may already be available and
it just needs to be the added on but we haven't had to really think a whole lot
about that yet because there isn't really a program in the southeast that's
that's similar to bear loss but it's definitely being discussed as we move
form this is related does TWRA offer or bear white certification program that
offers benefits and/or official designation as the participating
community I have to answer that with two words four words not yet but soon we
been working towards that and hopefully in the next 30 to 60 days we will be
able to make some pretty good strides in that I don't know if we'll have anything
official hopefully maybe by the end of calendar year but that is definitely
very high on our priority list and it goes back to what I mentioned just a few
minutes ago it's all about funding finding partners to help you make things
like that but in for us it's a manpower issue and we're looking at some some
unique ways to address the manpower issue and the funding issue and I'm
looking forward to where we're going with that right here's here's an
interesting question is there any data to show that information for the public
being biet websites posters magnets etc work to reduce conflicts absent
provision of materials like bear proof cane containers I appreciate that
question and I I'm probably not going to answer it right but I will say that it
is something that the large core working group and our subcommittee forebear wise
we we talk a lot about the need to be able to go back and and that some of the
things that were utilizing some of these resources to see if they're doing what
we wanted to do and is real good at looking at those Google
Analytics and seeing where people are going and we can we have the ability to
look at some of the pages where we're not getting a lot of traffic and maybe
figure out what's going on there and why people may not be going to those areas
but I hope in the future we start seeing some formal research to look at some of
the programs that paralyze is putting out there - number one make sure they're
working and number two to tweak them if we need to but I'm and that's one of the
things that you know I've been looking for that kind of information a long time
you know good scientific data that shows what works and what doesn't work and
it's pretty scarce and but I do think I will say this we've had reports I've
never seen it but I know I've heard about it were people literally standing
in front of a bear resistant trash can look at it over and then sit in the
trash bag down next to it around walking away because they don't know how to open
it so certainly it you know you got to have some education that goes along with
with some of these programs or it's not going to work at all yeah we're running
really tight on time but I want to get this last question in there what lessons
have you all learned about partnering what are the pitfalls fix to be aware of
well it's like bill said you gotta you can't get ahead of can't get the car to
hear the horse you gotta take your time I think another thing about partners
when you bring a bunch of people together and a task force you need to be
careful about how many people you're putting on the task force just because
you know you get bogged down with too many people and then other folks expect
someone else to do it so keep an eye on membership and just look for partners
that can bring things to the game I mean if if you've got three people that are
experts in the same thing there's no really no need to bring the fourth one
on there if you can help it and but go after the low-hanging fruit
you know because low-hanging fruit equals success and when
these types of groups are successful then that gives them empowerment and
motivation to go after some other things it may be a little bit further far of a
reach for them all right well thank you so much Linda Levon Dan and bill for a
great presentation tons of great material that you covered folks
obviously take a look at that bear wise website is a lot of great stuff there
I'm really excited to see it expand with through a swell like you mentioned Dan
and and and elsewhere sounds like the bear populations are
expanding so this has needed more than ever I included in the chatbox a link to
our next webinar which is on June 17 at 3 o'clock Eastern Time
and it's titled partnering with communities to conserve battlefields and
the American battlefield trust we'll be presenting for that webinar so you can
register there so with that yeah again Linda Levon Dan bill thank you so much
Dan bill or Linda any of you have any parting words for the group here
neighbor it's a long one I have I have one parting word this is this Linda you
know I've been working I've been the missing link between state agencies and
bear biologists and the public for a very long time and I think it is so
amazing to finally find something that people can everyone can agree on and
meet on because everyone I know who works in human bear conflict reduction
all the biologists all the people who work for the agencies they all care
desperately about what they are doing that's why they're doing it and when
people can understand that they to want to solve this problem they're not just
telling them what to do they're giving them reasons why it needs to be done and
what a difference it will make if they do it I really think this is a great way
to get every on the same page and kind of moving
forward together because they're all good guys well said thank you so much
Linda and thanks everyone for joining today
great presentation again folks that the recording will be posted to our YouTube
channel as well to the network for landscape conservation website and our
internal park service a toolkit so feel free to share those links when they're
made available should be within the next week or so with others and I hope
everyone has a great rest of their month here and week take care thanks man
thanks friend