The Friends
of
[Taken from the Toronto Star]
By Rosemary Speirs
Toronto Star Feature Writer
BRACEBRIDGE - Mike McIntosh drove into the forest Friday with two young bears squalling in a green trailer-cage behind his truck.
He figured the raspberries and chokecherries finally were plentiful enough - and the summer's human hysteria about wandering bears now low enough - to take a chance on restoring these two orphans to the wild.
``So long,'' McIntosh murmured as he raised the trap door of his trailer. The bears hesitated at the door, then suddenly bolted for freedom.
A volunteer ``bear rehabilitator,'' licensed by the province, McIntosh has been rescuing orphaned bear cubs for eight years. These two males bring the tally he's successfully raised and restored to the wild to 104.
``Have a good life,'' he added, as they scampered into the leafy underbrush. The spot, on crown land northeast of Bracebridge, is designated for bear release by the Ministry of Natural Resources.
A Pembroke conservation officer rescued the orphans late last year. Crawling in the early winter snow, they weighed 18 and 25 pounds and were starving to death. Now, they are a glossy 125 and 112 pounds and old enough to fend for themselves.
McIntosh raised them to be wild on his Bear With Us sanctuary near Sprucedale. It's best if they never go near another human.
Especially after this year's Summer of the Bear.
Across Ontario's cottage country, people this summer reported black bears haunting local dumps, pulling down hummingbird feeders for their sweet contents and, in one case, even eating the icing off a chocolate cake while the family dog cowered.
Biologists say near-starvation brought the normally reclusive bears prowling around humans. An unusually wet, cold early summer delayed or mouldered the berry crops on which black bears depend.
Ron Black, a wildlife biologist with the ministry's Parry Sound office, says that in most cases of callers reporting roaming bears, diplomacy prevailed. Once the callers were persuaded to clean up their garbage and scour the grease off their barbecues, their unwelcome visitors didn't return. Particularly persistent bears were tranquillized or trapped and hauled back to the wild.
But that was late June and July. In August, the bears began melting back into the bush to fatten on the late crops of fruit and nuts for this winter's hibernation.
But despite all the scares - despite the horrific story of the biathlete killed by a bear in Quebec - the fact is that during this summer in Ontario only one human is reported to have suffered physical harm. She was a tree planter near Chapleau whose leg was bitten.
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This year, plant development was unusually slow . . . so the bears went looking for food wherever they could find it. |
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- Biologist Maria de Almeida |
``It's typical to have bear problems early in the year (after months of hibernation have drained their fat reserves),'' says provincial biologist Maria de Almeida. ``This year, plant development was unusually slow . . . so the bears went looking for food wherever they could find it.''
Despite the anecdotal evidence of bear sightings in Ontario, there's no evidence that the bear population of about 100,000 is multiplying after the cancellation of the spring hunt, say provincial biologists.
The province extended the fall hunt by another two weeks (the bear-hunt season runs from Sept. 5 to Nov. 30 in southern Ontario this year). Preliminary evidence shows that the 1999 fall hunt was much bigger than usual and may yet tally close to the 6,800 bears that hunters used to take in total from the spring and fall hunts.
After last fall's bear hunt, McIntosh accepted 18 orphan cubs at his sanctuary. Infant cubs are bottle fed goat's milk but after that he permits almost no human contact. He pours sunflower seeds, fruit and fish into their tree-filled enclosure. ``They have hiding places. I may not see some individual cubs for days.''
Two cubs were dropped off by an outfitter after a hunter deliberately shot their mother. The outfitter spent hours catching the orphans and told the hunter not to come back. ``There are outfitters who do things right,'' says McIntosh.
He argues that the government hasn't ended the orphan bear problem by banning the spring hunt. McIntosh wants a ban on all killing of mother bears with dependent cubs less than a year old.
By day, McIntosh is a car salesman at a Huntsville dealership. He's not paid for his bear work, although he works closely with natural resources staff. They call on him when they are overloaded with nuisance bear calls.
On Wednesday nights, McIntosh gives slide presentations at local resorts, and talks to visitors about avoiding bear trouble. The rest of his free time is spent rescuing bears - and humans - from each other and maintaining a Web site at www.bearwithus.org.
Hunting spokespeople are less enthusiastic. They suggest McIntosh's cubs may not survive when he releases them. Or, if they do, it may be as nuisance bears - bears used to human contact.
But McIntosh says the prospects of the two cubs released yesterday are good. He has ear-tagged all 104 orphan cubs, and so far only eight have been shot, and only one was later termed a nuisance.
In June, a Quebec outfitter called him to report a hunter had shot one of his ear-tagged bears.
McIntosh's records showed he'd received her in December, 1995, as an 11-pound starving orphan. When she was shot, she was a healthy 160 pounds.
``I hate to get an ear tag returned,'' says McIntosh. ``But when it's four or five years later, that indicates rehabilitated cubs survive well in the wild.''