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6d5c73c5-4c18-45cd-8412-31045142cb52 < Back Slide 55 of 83 < > How important is it to keep enough white pines to maintain the genetic diversity populations need to adapt to new conditions like blister rust? Research has already shown that overharvest has caused white pines to lose some of their genetic diversity.

9a574ff5-b67a-418b-b982-6584be6e39ba < Back Slide 51 of 83 < > Or do white pines have values beyond wood, and might these other values become more important to all of us as white pines become scarce?

b6c120d9-8275-4fae-b4a1-8e043d6a78f8 < Back Slide 37 of 83 < > A half century ago when foresters were deciding not to plant white pines, they were also doing something they did not realize would make it harder for natural seedlings. They were protecting the forest from fire. This kept fires from spreading and kept seedlings from being burned up, but it also made fires unnaturally infrequent.

1d1c4d01-4db1-4467-8fc3-426b1cd366d4 Dens Winter shelters for black bears.

BEARTEAM LENDING RESOURCES Borrow resources to learn more If you are in the Eagles Nest Township area just contact us to borrow resources from our library of books and DVDs. Learn More Learn More

WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I SEE A BLACK BEAR? What should you do if you see a bear? Update February 20, 2010 – 6:26 PM CST (WRI Update ) What should you do if you see a black bear? The standard answer nationwide is, “Speak calmly and back away slowly.” This identifies you as a person, shows you to be non-threatening, and gives the bear space. Not bad advice. But do you have to follow that advice to avoid an attack? No. Those are polite actions that respect a black bear’s comfort zone and help ease its anxiety. It is the gentle way to separate. Standing quietly without speaking might give you more opportunity to observe what the bear is doing. More aggressive action would likely send the bear running like many of us saw on Animal Planet’s ‘Bear Whisperer’ a couple nights ago. Is one action safer than another? If a black bear is more than a few yards away, it seldom matters what you do. Attacks are rare no matter what. One might say, “What? I’ve heard lots of advice about what a person must do.” Yes, well-meaning advice-givers have said a lot of things. Most have had no close-up experience with wild, non-tranquilized bears, and that includes most bear biologists. A problem with most advice is that it really makes no difference and carries the hidden, scary message that if you don’t do it, you will be in deep trouble, maybe killed. Much of the usual advice is based on assumptions that bears are quick to anger—like they are portrayed on covers of hunting magazines—and that they would love to attack us if they only dared. We can attest, after 43 years of working with wild bears, that those assumptions are wrong. Realizing how little science and how little first-hand experience is behind the well-meaning advice, we have tested as much of it as possible. We have not found a way to reliably elicit an attack. In fact, in 43 years, we've never been attacked, even when holding screaming cubs in our hands with mother bears present. We've seen lots of bluff charges, but no attacks. The closest we’ve come to eliciting attacks is when we tackled bears, which we quit doing decades ago. Of course, the bears bit and clawed their way free, but then they ran instead of attacking. What to do about a bear in your yard probably depends on how you feel about black bears. Do you enjoy seeing wildlife on your property? Watching a bear can be a wonderful experience. As more people live close to their woodland homes, the chances of seeing black bears are rising. One Eagles Nest resident who enjoys seeing wildlife recommends quietly observing from a distance. Announce yourself so the bear knows you are present and you don't startle the animal. If the bear knows you are there and is not stressed by your presence it is a wonderful time to study black bear behavior. Is it a youngster just after family breakup and afraid of its own shadow? Afraid of being chased by mom? Is it a mother with cubs? Listen for the language she uses with her cubs. Has she treed them for safety? What are the personalities of the cubs? Are some more confident and others timid? Do you see more than one bear? Are they friends? Rivals? Potential mates? Is the bear foraging on vegetation in your yard? Could what you thought was an alder bush really be beaked hazelnuts? Would you prefer not to see black bears or have them on your property? If you want the bear to leave: Identify yourself as human Yell, scuff your feet, wave objects, etc. Ask yourself what brought the bear to your property. Is the bear just passing through? Bears have a right to monitor/mark their territory, seek food, and look for a mate. We share the Northwoods with them. Have you inadvertently left out things that attracted them such as bird feeders or garbage? Do you have fruit trees, a garden or other bear food growing on your property? Contact the BearTeam to assess your property and help you remove attractants.

Are black bears like dogs? No. In a forest at night, it’s easy to imagine bears as oversized attack dogs like we see them drawn in hunting magazines. Fortunately, that image is nowhere close to reality. Black bears are not like dogs that come after people in their owners’ yards. Black bears are not territorial toward people. They do not defend their territories against hikers or people who build homes in the woods. Black bears can be territorial toward each other, but people are not part of their social system. ARE BLACK BEARS LIKE DOGS? Bears do not have the range of expression dogs have. Bears do not snarl or raise their hackles. Bears might look like their hackles are raised in summer when they are shedding, but that is only because the last long hairs to shed are along the top of the neck and back. In fall, some bears look like their hackles are up, but that is only because under fur is growing in and making all their long hairs stand straight out. Dogs can be aggressive, territorial, and prone to attack. Black bears tend to be restrained, non-territorial toward people, and prone to retreat. For each person killed by a black bear across North America in the last century, about 45 people have been killed by dogs.

26e19514-ff54-47a2-a1ac-fb9b07f7bdaa < Back Slide 36 of 83 < > They decided to stop planting white pines, even healthy ones, but to go on cutting them. That policy of cutting white pines without replanting them has continued until recently, and it's the biggest reason why there are so few white pines today, and a major reason why there are so few young white pines. That's not the only reason though.

8d810842-3d7d-4a74-838b-c471dd7d70eb BROWN BEAR Back General Description: Brown bears have a bulky muscle mass located above the shoulders. This hump is designed to power the forelimbs and makes them exceptionally powerful diggers. This is one of the features that distinguishes them from the more common North American black bear which lacks such a shoulder hump. Distribution: Brown bears are the most widely distributed bears in the world. They are found in North America, Europe, and Asia. Habitat: Brown bears live in a variety of habitats, including forests, woodlands, alpine and subalpine meadows, and even the Arctic tundra. Diet: Brown bears are omnivorous. Depending on season, habitat, and region, they can eat grasses, berries, sedges, fungi, mosses, roots, nuts, fruits, honey, insects, birds, and fish (trout, bass, and particularly adult salmon returning to rivers to spawn). In some regions, 80-90% of their diet consists of vegetation. Population: 200,000 Length: Average 6.5 feet Height: 3.5 feet Weight: Males: 300 to 850 pounds, Females: 200 to 450 pounds Geographic Range

a8f01482-843b-4ac4-bf6b-5207006f1c0e < Back Slide 19 of 83 < > The forest might have grown back anyway from little white pine seedlings that had a good start on the forest floor. No one realized their harvest methods would kill those seedlings.

March 30, 2022 Do bears need a break? High hunter harvests may be be holding back recovery of the region’s black bear population Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2022 6:50 pm Marshall Helmberger As I’ve written here before, there is reason to be concerned about the status of the black bear population here in the North Country, in part because the population here on the Canadian Shield isn’t like the population found elsewhere in Minnesota. It’s obvious that the ability of a bear population, or any wildlife population, to sustain a given level of human hunting mortality is dependent on the ability of that species to replace those elements of the population lost to hunting or other sources of mortality each year. As top predators, bears have evolved for a very slow rate of reproduction, in order to prevent them from outstripping their habitat’s carrying capacity. In fact, bears exhibit some of the lowest reproductive rates of any terrestrial mammals, which means their ability to bounce back from downturns to their population is limited. For bears, hunter harvest is the primary form of mortality. As a substantial body of scientific literature has documented, the ability of black bears to sustain themselves in the face of human harvest is limited, and is highly dependent on available foods. It’s long been known that bear populations on the Shield have more limited reproductive potential due to limited foods compared to more productive areas to our south. Many of the most favored bear foods found elsewhere in the eastern half of North America are rare or non-existent here and that impacts bears in several ways. A 1981 study by two Canadian biologists, Fred Bunnel and David Tait, is still widely acknowledged to be among the most authoritative studies on bear population dynamics and it is worth reading by anyone with an interest in the subject. The study finds that the reproductive capacity of black bear populations is highly connected to their nutritional condition. Bears that have access to abundant food reach breeding age earlier, have large litters and more frequent litters. According to Bunnel and Tait, bears in quality habitat, such as is typical in central Minnesota or much of the northeastern U.S., can sustain a higher level of harvest. That’s because bears there reach sexual maturity at an average of 4.5 years, give birth on an average of once every 2.1 years, and have an average litter size of 3.1 cubs. Based on such criteria, bears can sustain an annual mortality rate of approaching 20 percent. But that number drops significantly in locations, like far northeastern Minnesota, where natural bear foods are scarcer. Up here, bears without frequent access to human sources of food don’t reach breeding age until age five or six, they have smaller litters, and their litters are more widely spaced. Black bear populations with these characteristics can sustain much lower levels of harvest, only about 13-15 percent according to Bunnel and Tait, and that assumes average conditions. According to Andrew Tri, one of the DNR’s top bear researchers, the current harvest level in the quota zone, which includes a large swath of central, northcentral, and northeastern Minnesota, is running around 15 percent, although DNR data suggests that percentage has averaged closer to 18 percent the past three seasons (see the chart above). Even at 15 percent, it’s distinctly on the high side of what is sustainable for bear populations in our area, and it certainly is not a recipe for bear population recovery, which is currently one of the DNR’s goals, at least publicly. The DNR is supposed to be managing for bear recovery in large part due to prior DNR management decisions, which cut the state’s bear population nearly in half between 2000 and 2010. Back then, the DNR was issuing around 20,000 permits a year and annual harvests were averaging about 3,500 animals, most of that in the quota zone. Back in 2000, the DNR, using a variety of models, estimated the state’s bear population at between 20,000 and 25,000 animals. After a decade of high harvest, the state’s bear population had fallen to between 10,000-15,000. The DNR slashed the number of bear permits dramatically beginning in 2012 in an effort to reverse course, but progress toward a recovery has been very slow, and has very likely gone backward in the past couple years, when poor bear foods led to harvests close to what we saw back in the 2000s. It should be noted that more of the state’s harvest is now coming from the state’s no-quota zone, which includes those parts of the state to the south and west of the quota zone, where bears are more of a management problem due to the presence of agriculture and greater incidence of human conflict in general. As permit availability, now around 3,500, plummeted in the quota zone, making permits much more difficult to obtain, more hunters have opted to try their luck elsewhere. The reduction in permits in the quota zone has led to a lower bear harvest to be sure, but nowhere near the reduction that might be expected given that permits were slashed from 20,000 to under 4,000. Bear hunter success rates have gone up as well, and that’s limited the beneficial impact of lower permit numbers. It’s also worth noting that hunters are now taking bears from a population that is much reduced. If you take 3,000 animals from a population of 20,000 bears, it’s the same in percentage terms as taking 1,500 bears from a population of 10,000. Because wildlife population modeling is inexact, and because the DNR doesn’t model by bear management area, we don’t know if there’s been any recovery of bear numbers in management areas 25 and 31, which, combined, encompass virtually all of the Shield country in Minnesota that sees any appreciable numbers of hunters. But there’s reason to believe that the harvest may still be outstripping the ability of the population to maintain itself here. Indeed, DNR officials acknowledge as much. The situation today is probably even worse than we know. Given the recent trend of poorer food years, it’s not clear that the bear population on Minnesota’s Shield country can sustain much of a bear harvest at all. In years of successive poor foods, like we’ve seen in recent years, research from Montana suggests that black bear reproduction can fall to near zero. Research in Minnesota finds a similar pattern. Bears are among a number of species that have evolved with delayed implantation of embryos. They breed in the late spring or early summer, but the fertilized eggs don’t implant in a female bear’s womb until November or December. If the female didn’t put on enough weight during the previous summer, those eggs simply don’t implant. Bear reproduction has likely fallen off sharply in our region during the past two years, and this coincides with some of the highest bear harvests we’ve had since the DNR reduced the permits. That’s one of the problems with managing black bear populations, particularly for recovery. It isn’t easy. When foods are scarce, bears are more susceptible to hunters’ baits, so that means the harvest goes up at a time when reproduction is likely going to fall. In years of repeated poor foods, such as we’ve seen recently, the problem compounds. And climate change may be a factor, here. We’ve seen a significant trend of more extreme temperature swings and greater variability in precipitation and it’s those extremes that have been impacting wild foods in our area. Early spring green-ups, followed by killing frosts in June, can wipe out berry crops. Droughts impact virtually everything. These are factors that have impacted natural foods the past 2-3 years and have undoubtedly affected bear reproduction. If the DNR isn’t reducing its permits to respond, the agency is putting the region’s bear population at even greater risk. The other alternative would be to prohibit or greatly restrict bear baiting in management areas where bears are struggling. That’s not as outlandish as it might sound. Twenty-eight states in the U.S. have bear seasons, and only 11, including Minnesota, allow hunting directly over baits. We’ve gotten used to the practice here, because it’s easy for hunters, but in most places it’s not allowed. And a few bear hunters in Minnesota don’t rely on baits even today. While the DNR focuses much of its attention on hunters, there are other people out there who actually like to see bears in the wild. I’m one of them, and I know I see a lot fewer bears than I used to. How do the DNR’s black bear management efforts meet the wishes of folks who’d like to see a few more bears out there in the woods? Not very well it would seem.

BEARS AND DOGS Staying safe with man's best friend Walk dogs on a non-retractable leash and be aware of your surroundings. Dogs can trigger defensive behaviors from bears. Carry bear or pepper spray and know how to use it. Although a bear attack is very rare, bear attacks often involve dogs off leash in a rural setting. Dr. Stephen Herrero, Professor Emeritus University of Calgary, a highly respected bear researcher with over 40 years of experience and a particular focus on Bear Attacks Their Causes & Avoidance (title of his book on the subject), along with his colleagues, just concluded a 3 year study of 92 Black Bear attacks across North America. The study determined that over half of these studied bear attacks involved a dog off leash. (Human Bear Conflicts - International Bear News Spring 2014, vol. 23 no. 1 ) An unleashed dog in the open will most often create an avoidable encounter which can result in injury to the dog & its owner. (https://wiseaboutbears.org/about-us/bear-attacks-2/ ) The Minnesota DNR states that since 1987, there have been eight unprovoked bear attacks in Minnesota that resulted in hospitalization. In three cases, the bears chased dogs that were not leashed. Bears perceive dogs as a threat, and dogs being chased often come back to their owner with the bear at heel. (https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/livingwith_wildlife/bears/encounters.html ) Visit BearWise.org for ways to be safe with your canine in bear country https://bearwise.org/bear-safety-tips/dogs-and-bears/