Two bears put down by wildlife officials over the weekend
Two bears were put down over the past weekend in Boulder County by wildlife officials, each for a different reason, at a time when the animals are ramping up their activity in preparation for the winter hibernation season.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife Area Wildlife Manager Kristin Cannon said a 190pound sub-adult male was discovered Saturday on the University of Colorado Boulder campus in a courtyard near the CU Museum of Natural History, with no good way to get out. Wildlife personnel felt they could not safely leave the bear where it was, so it was immobilized with a tranquilizer.
The bear had ear tags, showing it had been previously relocated by CPW from Niwot to the Rainbow Lakes area near the Boulder Watershed in May. Because that relocation didn’t take, Cannon said it was taken to a CPW facility and put down.
“(Relocation) was unsuccessful, because it ended up right back in the middle of the city a few months later. If it had not been ear-tagged, we probably would have relocated it. But that didn’t work, in this case,” Cannon said.
The second bear was trapped after breaking into a cabin in Fourmile Canyon, where multiple breakins have been reported. After being captured in a cabin Saturday morning, the bear was put down late Saturday or early Sunday at a CPW facility, the determination having been made it posed a threat to humans.
“With those kinds of bears, we feel there’s a higher likelihood they are going to be dangerous, if they are willing to break into houses to get food. We are going to remove that bear,” Cannon said. “With that bear, it was a little bit more the bear’s behavior, as opposed to the bear in town, where it was in a bad location.”
Cannon said her agency has now killed three bears in Boulder County this season. The other incident involved a bear that was previously tagged and relocated out of north Boulder in 2015, and behaved aggressively when confronted by rangers when encountered once again near Oak Avenue in north Boulder on July 2. Wildlife officials believed that bear had also bluffcharged a man on Hapgood Street in Boulder in June, in 2017 on Norwood Avenue in Boulder and yet again in 2016 in Ward.
Cannon said the deaths of the bears was not the desired result in any of the cases that have cropped up this summer in Boulder County.
“It wasn’t done without careful thought and consideration,” she said. “We just really sometimes are backed into a corner on these. We didn’t have any other reasonable options.”
At this time of year, bears are in a feeding frenzy called hyperphagia, which CPW describes as “an instinctive metabolic response to the approaching change of seasons.”