Nevada wildlife officials release Lake Tahoe bear back into wild near Mt. Rose
Submitted by editor on Mon, 10/10/2016 - 1:59pm
Nevada wildlife biologists released a three-plus year old male black bear back into the forest near the top of Mt. Rose Summit on Monday morning after capturing him Sunday in Incline Village at Lake Tahoe.
Nevada Department of Wildlife trapped the young bear while attempting to trap another bear that had caused damage to a building, according to wildlife biologist Carl Lackey. The bear that was captured and then later released Monday wasn't the bear Lackey was looking for.
Lackey says that NDOW had handled the released bear once before in the mountains east of the Lake Tahoe Basin.
“We captured him in Little Valley during a research project in 2015 when he was about two years old. We’ll release him today and apply aversive conditioning, including the use of Karelian bear dogs. Hopefully this will dissuade him from coming back to urban areas.”
Meanwhile, Lackey has a word of caution for Lake Tahoe residents, saying that bears are not ready to hibernate yet but will be searching out places where they could eventually hibernate.
“People in the Lake Tahoe Basin need to make sure they secure crawl spaces in order to keep bears from getting underneath houses. They can do a lot of damage to a dwellings infrastructure if allowed access to crawl spaces.”
NDOW's Chris Healy refers to an article he wrote in 2015, noting that this is also the time of year that bears increase the amount of food needed to “pile on the fat” for winter. Below is that article.
As autumn begins, the appetite of the Sierra Nevada black bear takes a dramatic swing upwards. Motivated by signals from nature known as zeitgebers, the bears spectacularly increase their daily caloric intake from 3,000 calories per day to upwards of 25,000 calories per day. This physiological wonder is known as hyperphagia. Nature’s dinner bell is ringing!
“Hyperphagia is a period where bears eat as much as they possibly can so they can put on as much fat as possible to carry them through winter hibernation,” said biologist Carl Lackey in 2015. “Nothing much gets in the bear’s way when they are this hungry.”
Armed with that big appetite and motivated by zeitgebers like decreased daily sunlight and cooler morning temperatures, the bears will search far and wide in the hunt for food. Those 25,000 calories are the human equivalent of eating about 50 cheeseburgers per day over the next couple of months.
“They will eat up to 20 hours per day during a full moon period as they pile on the fat,” stressed Lackey. “People living in bear country should not be tempting these already hungry bears with easy access to garbage, bird feeders, bowls of pet food or ripened fruit falling from trees.”
Areas most at risk of attracting bears by granting access to garbage and other attractants are the Tahoe Basin, west Carson City and the foothill areas of Douglas and Washoe counties.
Persons needing to report nuisance bear activity can call the NDOW’s Bear Hotline telephone number at (775) 688-BEAR (2327). For information on living with bears persons can go to www.ndow.org and find the ”Bear Logic” page on the web.
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