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[{"type":"text","text":"If there's a better example of teamwork, we've haven't seen it...."}]

You still here 8 24 24

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>You Still Here? Saturday, August 24, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

If there's a better example of teamwork, we've haven't seen it....

You Still Here? Saturday, August 24, 2024

 If there's a better example of teamwork, we've haven't seen it....

Heinz mark

Mark Heinz

Wildlife

Hunting

Arguments over grizzlies north of the border in Alberta, Canada, are remarkably similar to those in Wyoming and Montana, with some calling for the bears to be hunted again and others saying that would be a horrible idea.

The Rural Municipalities of Alberta is lobbying the provincial government to reinstate grizzly hunts, which were banned there in 2006.

Hunt advocates cite increasing conflicts with humans, as bears push farther into foothill and plains habitat — much like Montana’s expanding population of 

However, provincial authorities have stated not to expect grizzly hunts anytime soon, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. 

Grizzlies have been designated a threatened species in Alberta since 2010. At the time, it was thought there were fewer than 1,000 adults in the province.

The latest population study of Alberta’s grizzlies from 2018 suggested there could be more than 1,000 adult bears in the province, according to CBC.

Grizzlies in the Lower 48 have been under federal Endangered Species Act protections since 1975.

There is a renewed push to get grizzlies in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho delisted and possibly hunted. Wyoming Game and Fish Director Angi Bruce recently stated that her agency probably 

 over conflict management than hunters would if there was a grizzly season.  

The debate over whether to hunt grizzlies has been going on for a while, says human-bear conflict expert Kim Titchener, who lives in Alberta, in an interview with Cowboy State Daily.

“It keeps coming up. More so in areas that are the outskirts of grizzly bear habitat, where there’s a lot of livestock and agriculture,” said Titchener, the president of Bear Safety and More.

There have also been incidents of grizzlies and hunters running into each other and hunters getting mauled, she added.

There’s no evidence grizzly populations are “massively regrowing,” but bears have been showing up in new areas, Titchener said.

“These people haven’t seen a grizzly bear on their landscapes for 50 to 100 years,” she said.

That’s also what’s happening in Wyoming and Montana. Grizzlies have shown up in farmland near Powell and spotted as far south as the Kemmerer area.

In Montana, bears have wandered as far east as the Missouri Breaks.

Alberta allows hunters to apply for special tags for “problem bears,” such as those that have chronically raided chicken coops, Titchener said.

“There’s only been a few cases where we’ve allowed a hunter to do that,” she said.

And Titchener questions the effectiveness of that approach, versus having wildlife agents remove problem bears.

“It seems like the government pandering to the hunting community, and not really solving the problem,” she said.

Protecting livestock and poultry with electric fencing and livestock guardian dogs would probably be more effective, Titchener said.

She also questions the argument that allowing widespread hunting would make grizzlies more fearful of humans.

“If you kill a bear, you don’t really teach other bears. Dead bears don’t pass that information on,” Titchener said.

How much territory grizzlies reclaim could hinge upon human tolerance, she added.

“Do you want to have bears in only a very select area? Or are we going to accept that they are going to go out into lands where they once lived? That’s a choice that the public needs to make. And we can’t just hunt them back into oblivion,” Titchener said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"‘They Just Know’"}]

Guy Eastman of Cody participated in one of the last grizzly hunts along the British Columbia/Alberta provincial line. He killed a grizzly bear on the B.C. side in about 2007, right before B.C. followed Alberta’s lead and banned grizzly hunting.

As he sees it, Canadians had far fewer problems with grizzlies when they were hunted, said Eastman, who represents the third generation of the famous outdoor multimedia family that launched Eastman's Hunting Journal and a popular outdoors television show.

“It’s the same old story. They (Canadians) quit hunting grizzlies and now they’re having the same old problems,” he told Cowboy State Daily.

“I killed a bear on the backside of one of British Columbia’s ski areas,” he said.

And even though that was in June, there were plenty of people in the area enjoying hiking and other outdoor activities, with no bear trouble, Eastman said.

And he credits legal bear hunts at the time for that.

Eastman argues that grizzlies seem to have a different attitude when they’re hunted.

He recalled grizzlies being skittish during numerous black bear hunts in Canada, when people he was hunting with also had grizzly tags.

“Those grizzlies, because they were hunted, were super, super shy,” he said.

“They just know (they’re being hunted),” Eastman added. “They’re incredibly intelligent. They have about twice the IQ of a black bear. They just know.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Fall Is The Worst Time"}]

Allowing grizzlies to be hunted might mitigate human-bear conflicts during the fall, which seems to be the worst time for 

During the spring and early summer, bears can feed on elk calves, he said. And at the height of summer, grizzlies are feeding on moths far above timberline, where not many people go.

“By August, the calves are too big for them to catch and the moths are gone,” he said, so that’s when the trouble really starts.

“If we started hunting them, the number of bear incidents would go down,” Eastman said.

But that would raise the question of how bear viewing would be affected, he added.

“The problem is, human nature. People want to see bears, If you want to see bears, you can’t hunt bears, because they get scared of you,” he said.

‘Grizzlies Are Reintroducing Themselves’

Grizzlies are naturally a plains species; they’ve been contained mostly to the mountains because of human settlement, Danny Kinka, senior wildlife restoration manager for the American Prairie conservation group in Montana, told Cowboy State Daily.

American Prairie has property at the south end of the Missouri Breaks, near the confluence of Judith Creek and the Missouri River.

Grizzlies have occasionally shown up there. And American Prairie likes the idea of an established subpopulation there someday, even though it’s outside of Montana’s officially designated grizzly recovery zone.

Kinka doesn’t see grizzly hunting in prairie habitat being a possibility anytime soon.

“With hunting, the goal is essentially to remove animals that might have died anyway,” he said.

Grizzlies reproduce slowly, and it would be long time, if ever, for enough of them to be established in the Missouri Breaks region for a huntable surplus population, he said.

The main debate over whether grizzlies should be hunted in Montana will probably involve the more abundant bear populations in western Montana, he said.

American Prairie remains optimistic that people will remain reasonably tolerant of grizzlies in the area, Kinka said.

“They’re coming back on their own. It’s not being imposed on anybody through government reintroduction. Grizzly bears are essentially reintroducing themselves,” he said.

Boss 1 6 22 26

<title>Just Like In Wyoming, There's A Big Argument In Alberta Over Hunting Grizzlies | Cowboy State Daily</title>

As in Wyoming, grizzlies are showing up in Alberta, Canada, in places they haven't been seen in 50 to 100 years. And just like Wyoming, their arrival has sparked emotional debate over whether to hunt the endangered species again.

Just Like In Wyoming, There's A Big Argument In Alberta Over Hunting Grizzlies

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Outdoors

Public Lands

Almost a week after a semitruck carrying 

 flipped over in Yellowstone National Park and destroyed hundreds of hives, bees are still swarming around the area.

Thousands of bees are still homeless and visibly trying to survive in large groups on “bee trees” along U.S. Highway 191. 

Jim Holstein with Yellowstone Tour Guides has been passing through the area where the accident occurred. He took a photograph of one of the bee trees, where thousands of bees had completely covered a small lodgepole in a vast, buzzing swarm.

“They were still there on Monday,” Holstein told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s in the park between Big Sky and West Yellowstone. All the hives have been cleaned up, but there are quite a few bees left.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Bee Trees"}]

Cheyenne beekeeper Michael Jordan is familiar with bee trees. They’re an indication that a colony of bees is actively house-hunting.

“It’s what's called a swarming mechanism,” he said. “The queen leaves and takes about half or more of the colony and moves to a new safe location.”

Jordan said this is common behavior for honeybees when a hive gets overpopulated. The existing queen will take nurse bees and guard bees to sustain herself in a temporary location while scouts search for a permanent 

“The scouts will search until they find a permanent location,” he said. “In the meantime, you'll have groups and colonies hanging in the trees as they regroup.”

A new permanent home could be a hole in a tree, a cave, or “anywhere that’s out of the water and elements,” said Jordan. 

Bee trees are meant to be staging locations so the scouts can lead the hive to their new home.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Sugar High"}]

When the scout bees find a suitable location for a permanent hive, their next priority is

“Right now, they’re looking for a sugar source,” Jordan said. “Bees need sugar to produce wax from their glands. Once they produce the wax and form it, they'll actively engineer foam in what we call a pendulum manner to make honeycombs.”

Bees instinctively know how to build hives, and their goal is to start propagating as soon as possible after a hive-destroying incident.

Once they find a suitable spot with plenty of sugar in the vicinity, maybe a rock formation or building near a flower-filled meadow, the queen will follow the scouts to the new hive. Instinctively, all the bees on the bee tree will follow her.

Jordan didn't think there would be any bee trees for tourists to see by Wednesday.

“Those clusters will be gone within 24 to 48 hours if they find a good location,” he said. “After that, there’s nothing you can do to recover them, because tracking them is very hard.

The fact that bee trees can still be seen along U.S. Highway 191 six days after the June 16 crash might indicate the bees are having trouble finding an ideal place for a new home. But it definitely means the colonies can be safely recovered.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Get Those Bees, Please"}]

Within 24 hours of the semitruck incident, people were at the scene removing the damaged honey boxes and trying to recover whatever remained of the bee colonies that had been residing in them.

Jordan said the first 48 hours are crucial in a bee recovery situation like that.

“If you can’t get new hives set up in 48 hours, the queens will migrate and leave a pheromone trail that the bees accommodating her in that hive will follow,” he said. “That’s what the bee trees are: thousands of bees accumulating around the queen.”

That means there’s a small window to safely save these bees before they become permanent Yellowstone residents.

Jordan’s strategy would be to place a mobile swarm trap. It’s basically a column of PVC pipes with buckets attached to either end. The height can be adjusted to get as close as possible to the colony clusters.

“If the bees accumulate in the buckets as a temporary hive, you can relocate them to an apiary and manage them there,” he said. “You can even hold a bucket up to the colony and shake them inside. That’s how you can naturally collect and remove a colony.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"No Bears — Yet"}]

Commercial vehicles like semitrucks are banned in Yellowstone, but U.S. Highway 191 is an exception. It hugs the western boundary of the park and is an important 55-mile thoroughfare between West Yellowstone and Big Sky, 

"They've enacted a temporary 35 mph speed limit on the section where the bees are," Holstein said. "People have to keep their windows up, and there's no stopping until crews can get the remaining bees rounded up."

When the bee trees disappear, it means the bees have found a suitable spot to rebuild their hive. Finding and removing the colony would be difficult, if not impossible, especially in the dangerous wilderness of Yellowstone.

[{"type":"text","text":"After all, who loves honey more than bears?"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"“I haven’t seen any bears,” Holstein said. “Yet.”"}]

Jordan was more concerned about the people who lost their honey boxes and bee colonies. He knew how much money they had lost and must have spent trying to salvage whatever they could from the accident.

“From the way it looks. I’d think about 40-50% of what’s there is salvageable, maybe,” he said. “Each honey box can cost around $500 and generate around $2,000 in honey. 

"There could be two or three owners who lost their livelihood in that accident. That’s at least one whole company that has to rebuild.”

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<title>Millions Of Bees Swarm On Trees In Yellowstone After Hives Smashed In Semi Crash | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Almost a week after a semitruck carrying millions of bees flipped over in Yellowstone National Park and destroyed hundreds of hives, bees are still swarming on trees in the area. “It’s what's called a swarming mechanism,” said a Wyoming beekeeper.

Millions Of Bees Swarm On Trees In Yellowstone After Hives Smashed In Semi Crash

Opinion

CSD Columnists

Waiting tables paid for my college education. The work taught me things no classroom offers. 

I worked the dinner shift at the restaurant in the Holiday Inn while attending college. At first, the job was mainly a way to pay tuition, rent, food and other expenses. 

Looking back, I realized how much I had learned about service, people, pressure, responsibility and opportunity.

I didn’t take the most direct path through college. I squeezed a four-year degree into five-and-a-half years, largely because I spent too much of my first year partying and too little time showing up for classes. My parents saw the problem before I did and, rightly, called me on it.

My response was to declare my independence and pay for the rest of college myself. 

Independence sounded bold. It also came with tuition bills.

Waiting tables made that independence possible. By graduation, I had only a $1,750 loan, which I repaid before it was due. More importantly, the work gave me control over my cash flow. After tuition and living expenses, my flexibility hinged on the tips I earned. Those tips reflected how well I served people, how carefully I paid attention and how I handled a busy room.

There was a direct connection between effort and result. Good service mattered.

Paying for my education also changed the value I placed on it. Once my labor paid the bill, wasting time in class or failing to prepare no longer felt abstract. I knew how many hours on my feet stood behind each tuition payment. I had earned the right to be there, and I had no interest in wasting it.

The job taught much more than financial responsibility. Waiting tables required me to read people quickly. Some customers wanted conversation. Others wanted efficiency and quiet. Some needed help choosing a meal. Others knew exactly what they wanted. A server had to adjust without becoming artificial.

The work also taught time management in its most practical form. One table was ready to order, another needed refills, another was waiting for food, and another wanted the check. The kitchen needed an answer. New customers were being seated. 

Every task mattered, but not every task mattered at the same moment.

I learned to decide what needed attention first, what could wait, and what belonged in one trip. Here’s the thing: that skill applies in any profession where people, deadlines or problems compete for attention.

The real test came when weather closed Interstate 80 between Laramie and Rawlins. Travelers arrived tired, stressed and uncertain about when they would be moving again. The restaurant filled quickly. The kitchen backed up. People had few alternatives and little patience left.

I couldn’t reopen the highway, create more tables or make meals appear faster. I could explain the situation, keep people informed, correct what was within reach and avoid making their stress worse.

That was an early lesson in leadership. You are often responsible for an outcome without controlling every part of the system. People still look to you for answers. Your job is to stay calm, tell the truth, make sound decisions and keep things moving.

Waiting tables also taught me how much work depends on other people. The customer saw the server, but the meal depended on cooks, bartenders, hosts, bus staff and managers. Good service required clear communication and respect for every person involved. No one succeeded for long by treating the rest of the staff as background.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Then there were the strangers."}]

During my final year, I waited on a group of Navy recruiters. We struck up a conversation. After the restaurant closed, I joined them for a couple of drinks. That conversation led to Navy Officer Candidate School and the start of my Navy career.

At the beginning of the shift, I had no reason to think the people at one table would change the direction of my life. It started with doing my job and being willing to talk to strangers. You never know which ones.

Waiting tables paid for my education twice: once in tuition, once in everything else. The work taught me to serve, communicate, prioritize, adapt, cooperate and accept responsibility. It didn’t become my career. It prepared me for two of them.

Think about that the next time someone dismisses service work as just a job. Or when a young person in your life asks what they should do to get ahead. Point them toward work that teaches. 

The paycheck matters. What the job makes of the worker matters more.

Gail Symons can be reached at: GailSymons@mac.com

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<title>Gail Symons: Waiting Tables Woke Me Up Pretty Fast | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Columnist Gail Symons writes, "After tuition and expenses, my flexibility hinged on tips. Those tips reflected how well I served people. There was a direct connection between effort and result, and good service mattered."

Gail Symons: Waiting Tables Woke Me Up Pretty Fast

A few weeks ago, tourists chuckled as a young grizzly named Storm was chased off by an angry sandhill crane, but nobody was laughing Thursday when Storm devoured an elk calf alive in front of about 100 people.

The calf was alive for roughly 15 minutes as it was being eaten by the 3-year-old female, wildlife researcher John Winnie Jr. told Cowboy State Daily.

Winnie was there with students from his Yellowstone National Park wildlife ecology field class.

“We were kind of awed at watching a bear take prey," said Winnie, an associate teaching professor in the Department of Ecology at Montana State University.

“But we were shocked and surprised at a calf staying alive that long,” he added.

“There were mixed comments from the crowd,” as 

 near the shore of Yellowstone Lake, Cody resident Vince Vanata told Cowboy State Daily.

“Some people had empathy for the elk calf, and some people were thinking it was just nature taking its course,” he said.  

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Good Find For A Bear"}]

Similar to deer fawns, elk calves have little to no natural scent, Winnie said.

And for about the first two weeks of their lives, the calves can’t walk well enough to keep up with their mothers, he added.

So, their mothers will stash them in hiding places and then leave to go feed, occasionally returning to nurse the calves.

Unfortunately for the calves, that trick doesn’t always work, Winnie said. Sometimes, the mother’s lingering scent from a nursing session will be enough to tip off a bear, wolf, or coyote.

And other times, a calf might move at just the wrong moment (or, from the predator’s perspective, just the right moment).

That might have been the case with Storm on Thursday, Winnie said.

He wasn’t there when the grizzly first found that calf, but said one of his students witnessed the moment. The bear’s head suddenly snapped in the calf’s direction right before she moved in and found the helpless young elk.

That probably means Storm heard the calf rustling in the grass, or caught a glimpse of it moving, Winnie said.

Once Storm started eating, it was hard to watch, he said.

The calf cried out as it was being devoured, but no other elk heard it.

“The nearest cow elk we saw were probably out of earshot, 400 to 500 yards away,” Winnie said.

Vanata said he thinks Storm had earlier been hazed by park rangers from another location.

“I think that if the rangers hadn’t had moved the bear, it wouldn’t have been there to find that calf,” Vanata said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Bears Take A Heavy Toll"}]

The elk calf’s gruesome fate was a common one, Winnie said. Elk calves suffer high mortality rates, and predation is one of the main causes.

And most of the predation comes from bears, both grizzlies and black bears, he said.

“I don’t think a lot of people grasp just how high elk calf mortality is,” Winnie said.

It’s thought that as many as 90% of cow elk are pregnant going into spring, “and most of them carry their calves to term,” he said.

So, there might be as many as 80 calves per 100 cow elk when the birthing season starts, usually in early June.

However, “by the time the first of the next year rolls around in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we’re down to around 20 to 25 calves per 100 cows. And most of the calves that were lost were lost to predation,” Winnie said.

Wolves have the advantage of hunting in packs, so calves aren’t worth their effort, Winnie said. They tend to concentrate on adult elk.

Coyotes will take quite a few elk calves and deer fawns, but bears take the most by far.

As lone hunters, bears have slim odds of taking down adult elk, so they focus on calves during the spring.

And because they can’t count on finding the calves by scent, they’ll scour the ground hoping to find a meal, Winnie said.

He said he’s seen bears apparently “working a grid pattern” in areas where they think calves or fawns might be.

And it’s not uncommon for calves or fawns to be eaten alive, Winnie said.

“I’ve seen it twice before, both times with black bears,” he said.

When taking down larger prey, predators rely on “killing bites,” Winnie said. That’s because they can’t risk injury from an adult prey animal fighting back.

But with calves and fawns, bears can just use their “overbearing weight” to pin down the hapless prey and eat at leisure, Winnie said.

Sometimes mother deer or elk will try to distract the bears away from their young, but usually to no avail, he said.

“I saw once where a white-tailed deer got right in front of the bear, raised her tail and jumped, but the bear didn’t even notice her” as it focused on the fawn, he said.

A sandhill crane recently had better luck scaring Storm away from its young.

When Storm got too close to the crane’s nest, the bird came at the young bear, standing tall with its wings spread. That was enough to 

Storm belongs to famous Yellowstone grizzly lineage. She’s the daughter of Snow, one of the park’s most visible bears.

And Snow in turn is the daughter of Raspberry, likely Yellowstone’s most famous living grizzly.

Raspberry has been missing for about a year and is feared by many of her fans to have died.

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<title>Yellowstone Tourists Learn That Nature Can Be Brutal When Grizzly Attacks Elk Calf | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Tourists in Yellowstone got a brutal taste of reality Thursday when a grizzly went after a live elk calf and devoured it. John Winnie, an ecology professor at Montana State who was there, said most people don't "grasp just how high elk calf mortality is."

Yellowstone Tourists Learn That Nature Can Be Brutal When Grizzly Attacks Elk Calf

When a massive bull bison died next to a busy road in Yellowstone National Park, the park’s rangers, bear management team, and maintenance crews had to get creative to quickly and safely dispose of it.

April Mead, a wildlife photographer based in Gardiner, Montana, spent three hours watching 

 unfold near Canyon Village on Friday morning. A front-end loader was needed to lift the 2,000-pound bison and drop it into a dump truck.

Meanwhile, the bear management team kept everyone safe from the hungry eyes of a determined grizzly.

“The grizzly came back while they were in the process of moving the carcass,” she said. “She was circling the hillside and the corrals. They had to haze her a couple of times before she left.”

Mead has seen and shared images of Yellowstone’s carcass removal process before, but this one was notably different. It seemed as if the park’s experienced staff were improvising the best way to get the job done quickly and safely.

“It’s different from all the others I’ve seen,” she said. “They spent a lot of time strategizing before they got it done.”

Yellowstone rangers used a front-end loader and creativity to get a 2,000-pound bison carcass away from a busy road near Canyon Village on Friday. A wildlife photographer said a grizzly was circling the area determined to have the roadkill for breakfast.

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