Quote:
Originally Posted by bdub
Thanks for your knowledge and the information posted.
If it is bears preying on caribou calves, which I believe 100%, how many do you think we need to remove to make a difference on calf survival to see an increase the caribou herd? From what I've noticed from working and hunting in the area and talking to others who also spend hundreds of days a year in the area is that grizzly numbers are very, very high.
Do you think the government would consider the research and use it to support reinstating a grizzly hunt to help the caribou or is it a hopeless cause in your opinion? Do we know where the caribou calve and could we target bears just in that area or would that be unworkable?
I believe they also use the area as a dumping ground for problem bears from other areas so that can't be helping.
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Well I will share with you what we are working on. We have developed a suite of potential deterrents which we had opportunity to test the delivery system with bears and any other predator that cared to visit.
We designed a caribou calf decoy. it was wired with an electric fence charger and motions sensors to turn the fence unit on or off and to also control a small speaker that sounds like a bleating calf. We also has external speakers that simulated a moose calf in distress. These were placed in the field in places where bears frequented and when a bear touched the decoy he or she got zapped. We tested this from early July through to mid-October. We used trail cams to monitor activity. We has several bears, racoons, fishers, deer and elk visiting our sets. Bears were quite expected response- bite the decoy and get 10000 volts. We believe that this has potential to reduce bear predation and over time could be a highly effective means to alter behaviour. I do believe however that stepping up voltage to the highest pain threshold is important- I personally tyook the 10000The answer is of course range dependent and tied to the combination of moose and bear populations in the area, but they could take up to 60% of moose calves in some ranges. Bears are opportunistic feeders and their behaviour is linked to plant phenology in the spring. Phenology refers to the timing of plant events, so if you have an early spring and popular and aspen flower early, bears have a food source that could distract them from habitats where moose and/or other ungulates may be calving. I did a lot of research on phenology back in the 1970s and we demonstrated over a 19 year period the range in days between early and late spring green up and it was more than 30 days- to foraging wildlife that is a lot.
There is also research from alberta where bears have been shown to be the primary predator of elk calves. A bear does not discriminate a calf of one species from another.
I am going to give you a posting of some videos to watch that were taken by people just out in the bush and the opportunity they had to observe bears in action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDEW-nIg844
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLLd5OOgL8Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y60doLjqeu0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfAIQGk2Bh8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt-Eqrvp4B0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SqqG_LUss0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBBmdays-c4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap4A2A_3WJY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M12HHvXSKno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7AjLFLeW34
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iCzcazLOUs
If people are interested I can post access to a number of excellent articles on bear predation of calves of all sorts