Bear advocates urge residents to sort and lock up their garbage
Accessible food waste increases danger for humans and animals, experts say
The garbage-bear problem was getting so bad at a Port Coquitlam housing complex that the live-in manager was spending two hours every morning cleaning up after the regular, late-night snacking by a family of bruins.
The bears would methodically knock over each of the 20 unlocked recycling bins in which tenants would toss household garbage along with bottles and tins.
“The bears would just sit there and have the knocked over cans in front of them and they’d eat half the can and then you’d have to be cleaning up their droppings,” said Marty Rykers, resident manager at the Riverwoods complex. “They would just grab a muffin and then eat it and take something else. Then the raccoons would come and join them.”
He said they would also crawl into the larger dumpsters and tenants would toss their garbage on top of them.
The animals became so habituated to the food source that a family of five moved into the nearby trees and Rykers would have to remain outside to keep an eye on the children playing nearby.
In December, another group of bears, two sows and four cubs, were euthanized by conservation officers after feeding on household garbage and refusing to leave people’s yards in Port Coquitlam when they should have been hibernating.
Susan Zanders of the BCB Black Bear Association brokered an idea for the Affordable Housing Societies, which owns and runs the complex, to lock up the dumpsters and bins to reduce bear attractants.
The cans were locked with straps provided by the city and the open wooden fencing around the dumpsters was replaced with a chain-link fence enclosure with an auto-closing gate that was kept locked. Tenants are being educated about keeping trash out of the recycling cans.
“It’s all about eliminating the attractant and then the bears will move on,” she said.
Rykers said it seems to be working. There have been a couple of sightings of bears but when they can’t open the bins, they move on, he said.
The solution cost $12,000 and Martin Hufty of the Affordable Housing Societies says the solution is “so far, so good.”
Zanders said she would like to see other rental and strata buildings in the northeast sector of Metro Vancouver near wildlife corridors that use shared trash facilities adopt something similar to save bears.
Ensuring garbage-sorting compliance and proper container closures at multi-family buildings is “the most difficult thing we have to deal with,” said Sgt. Todd Hunter of the Conservation Office Services.
“This (solution) has been a large success and it should be a model” for other complexes, he said. “We encourage everybody to come up with a similar solution.”
There have been other similar projects over the years to contain garbage that attracts wildlife.
“Bears are very motivated to find garbage that is left to fester. They
can smell it. They are designed by nature to bust into stuff to get food,” Hunter said.
It’s up to humans to reduce that attraction and “this is an excellent example. This is exactly what we want to see.”
But he said rules governing strata and wildlife are complicated and it’s best left to the buildings to devise their own solutions. Municipalities are also making suggestions and issuing violation tickets to encourage compliance for garbage storage, he said.
“It’s not good to leave your garbage out,” Hunter said. “They (the bears) need us to help find a way for there not to be conflict” between humans and bears. He said the earlier warmer weather has led to an increase in wildlife-human conflict calls this year, but it was too early for official statistics.
Bears are very motivated to find garbage. ... They can smell it. They are designed by nature to bust into stuff to get food.