Redwood Reader

I read with interest the North Coast Journal article about tree predation by black bears. Bears eating tree bark are not a new problem on the North Coast. It was a problem for us in the eighties and is again since tree planting in Middle Creek. It would appear to be a normal reaction in times of stress exacerbated by people and really exacerbated by people competing for the same trees.
When we first saw predation by bears in the early eighties, we talked with a neighbor about it. His neighbor was the county depredation officer at the time and he said they were killing about forty bears a year, mostly for timber companies. In the spring, young males are driven off the sows range to establish their own ranges. Young females take ranges next to the sow and know where to look for food, and so are far less of a problem. This would be a good point to confirm.
Anyway, little food is available in the spring. Flavor is less important to the starving. One nutritious favorite is berry shoots and cames. In Oregon, roadbuilders in the forests were required to plant berries along new forest road construction to help with the problem. Bear Creek Nursery was selling plantable bear scat so a mixture of food producing plants could be planted. Many national nurseries and seed companies sell plants for wildlife food. I am sure people don’t equate planting with “feeding” wildlife.
While timber companies have a value on every stick and an annual value multiplier that makes trees worth more as time goes by, we must remember the companies do not plan to allow these trees to become large enough to be bear resistant. By all accounts the bears are attacking young trees in the rapid growth stage resulting from the little competition left after devastation, whether intentional or accidental. We heard reports the bears only ate this type or that type of tree. In reality, they have damaged or killed redwood, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir on my property. All planted trees. They seem to take out your fastest biggest growers, the most vigorous ones. In my experience they damage only a few trees in any given year, and many years are not a problem. But some years they can make you want to scream.
Bears in the compost were a constant concern and we were careful to keep animal fat out of the compost. This also keeps odors and insects down. We really didn’t have the problems folks closer to town seemed to have with them. We had to keep bone meal and the like in lidded barrels but the plastic seemed to contain the odor.
We saw bears regularly, sometimes almost daily. We never had an aggravated incident and were never threatened enough to drive them away like people in the parks do defending their barbecues. Bears never found much food there either and it did not become a regular stop in their travels, which seemed to centered on acorn areas and rotten stumps and logs, which were full of large grubs.
Black bears do not thrive in old growth forests. They take advantage of forest openings, dead and dying trees, shoots, sprouts, sun assisted plants like berries and mahonia and salal, mushrooms and mast, the product of hardwood trees. Young fast growing replacement trees are full of the same nutrients, and are easy to work as the bark is still very thin. I have yet to see a large diameter conifer, or any hardwood, stripped by bears.
For the long term grower, bark shredding is probably a stage the trees will grow through. The bears will move from young stand to young stand as needed. Timber companies will feel more threatened, as they create better bear habitat every day they cut. Timber companies will want to harvest the trees just as they are reaching conditions beyond a simple meal for the bears, locking them into a cycle of maintaining the trees in perfect condition to feed the bears. In some states it has been found deer and bear are stripping parks because there is no depredation, and population control is becoming the problem.
Folks living and working in the wild lands have to deal with many issues, and much of the conventional wisdom is no longer sufficient. The availability of spring time bear food, here the cambium layer of fast growing forest trees, is directly linked to the health of the mycorhizzia, the production of carbohydrates by the trees, the production of glomalin by said mycorhizzia, water storage and the food web starting at the hyphae of the fungi and up through all the subsoil organisms, including hypogenous fungi that fruit below the ground. It is also to be noted that select cuts do not suffer the same level of destruction from bears as masses of fast growing new trees.