Bears declare open season on Missoula fruit trees

Two weeks ago, a Rattlesnake resident woke up in the middle of the night to the screams of a fawn being beaten to death by a black bear against the side of her house.

When Chuck Jonkel, co-founder and scientific advisor of Missoula’s Great Bear Foundation went to the house to help clean up the partially eaten fawn, he noticed fruited plum and pear trees, grape vines, and a bird feeder in the yard, all of which are attractive to bears. 

Since then, Jonkel said, the fruit has been picked, the bird feeder has been removed, and even the ground under the bird feeder has been vacuumed for spilled seeds.

If you have apples hanging from your trees or plums lying on your yard, you might also have some unwelcome visitors over for dinner.  To black bears, the scent of ripened fruit every fall is an invitation into Missoula, so for the safety of Missoula residents (both bear and human) volunteers from the Bears and Apples Program are picking fruit at the request of residents throughout town.

Around 20 volunteers have worked more than 60 hours already this year picking apples, plums, pears, and grapes around Missoula, according to Jason Mandala, coordinator for the Bears and Apples Program, a joint effort of Garden City Harvest and the Great Bear Foundation.  While most of the nearly 40 participants so far this year have been in the Rattlesnake neighborhood, Mandala said that participants ranged from the South Hills to west of Reserve Street, where new homes are being built near old orchards.

“The Rattlesnake area has been our focus because of the number of bear interactions,” Mandala said, “but we told people anywhere in the city to call us.”

Bears are attracted into Missoula throughout the year, drawn in by unsecured garbage and bird feeders, but ripening fruit bring in even more bears in the fall, according to Jonkel.

“Once the wild fruit comes to an end, once the huckleberries and chokecherries are gone, the bears start coming in,” Jonkel said.  “And of course, Missoula smells real good with all its pears and plums that the bears just have to come down.”

Jonkel added that some wild fruit like mountain ash berries and kinnikinnick (whose scientific name Arctostaphylos uva-ursi literally means “bear berry”) continue to feed as well as attract bears this time of year. 

Fruit picked by the Bears and Apples Program is taken by volunteers, distributed through community food programs, or juiced at the Great Bear Foundation.  Unusable fruit and windfalls are composted at the Northside Community Garden.

Jonkel said that Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks receives five to 15 phone calls every day reporting bears in the Rattlesnake neighborhood alone. Most of these reports are merely sightings of local, and so far peaceful, bears, like the big cinnamon-colored bear that Jonkel has known to make appearances in the upper Rattlesnake for more than three years. 

Because Missoula continues to grow (the county population has increased by a thousand people every year since 2000) and neighborhoods in historical bear habitat like the Rattlesnake and the South Hills continue to expand, it seems the city is coming to the bears rather than the other way around.  With this increasing urban/wilderness interface comes the challenge of balancing the needs of wildlife with the amount of interaction humans want, which can vary greatly.

“Some people like to walk down the trails and bump into a bear,” Jonkel said. “Others are afraid to use the trails because of the bears.”

The UM Office of Public Safety usually receives a few reports of bears on campus every year, according to Capt. Jim Lemcke, although there have not been any yet this fall.  When a bear is spotted on campus, Public Safety officers are usually busier controlling curious crowds than controlling the bear.

“We don’t deal with the bear at all,” Lemcke said. “We just try to keep the people away from the bear.”

Lemcke said that in the past, bears have been scared up trees by interested people who then surrounded the tree, preventing the bear from escaping.

“Give him some room, and the bear will go away,” Lemcke said.