By Kayla Heinze, Communications and Outreach Coordinator
Kari Kingery, the Wildlife Program Manager of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), looks around the office to take stock of her team. Along with seven biologists, two who specialize in carnivore monitoring and conflict prevention, and a variety of agency and nonprofit partners, Kari monitors, manages and mediates relationships with land-dwelling wildlife on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. This includes the grizzly bears of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) who roam the tribal lands in the Mission Mountains, valley bottom and beyond into neighboring counties and watersheds.
The Mission Valley’s abundance of wetlands and creeks, as well as visionary tribal management approaches, make it a great home for a wide array of wild animals—as well as a growing human population and agricultural community. Vital Ground is proud to support the CSKT Wildlife Management Program in their efforts to promote coexistence between grizzlies, other large carnivores and the people who share the landscape with them. This isn’t always a simple or easy goal, as Kari detailed when we caught up recently via phone and email. Bears occasionally raid chicken coops, apple trees, cornfields and more and people aren’t always eager to change their lifestyles in response.
“When wildlife come into competition with humans over the same resource, we have a conflict,” Kari said. “Making room for carnivores on the landscape requires people changing their behaviors and thinking about how they live differently… and that’s hard!”
That’s where Kari and her team step in to ease the burden, encourage coexistence and promote a bear smart community on the Flathead Reservation.
Helping landowners secure attractants to ‘Kill the Conflict, Not the Carnivore’
Securing attractants can certainly be hard, but to Kari, and all of us who value these species, it’s a worthwhile investment to protect the rich and unique ecological heritage of the Northern Rockies. And it doesn’t require that we forgo our lifestyles completely.
“We CAN move to the heart of the Mission Valley and raise our chickens, goats or llamas, but we have to do it differently here,” Kari said. “As good stewards to our livestock and poultry, we need to take extra measures to protect them from carnivores. Which, in turn, protects our carnivores and wildlife; the wild that makes Montana attractive in the first place.”
Around 2010, as more people started following that attraction and moving to the Mission Valley, the Wildlife Management Program biologists started seeing an increase in conflicts. Hobby farming grew in popularity, there was rapid development and building and the grizzly population of the NCDE was also gradually growing. CSKT’s approach had to evolve in tandem.
“As Native people, we act as stewards of the natural resources that our culture and traditions rely on,” Kari said. “We live in a very different world today than we did generations ago, and that means that managing the grizzly bear is less about the bears themselves and is really about managing the human world around us.”
To manage the human world, biologists of the Wildlife Management Program spend a lot of time assisting the Flathead Reservation’s residents with securing common attractants such as pet food, bird feeders, antifreeze, orchards, and chicken coops. When possible they are able to proactively prevent bad behavior, by bears and people, so that the difficult decision to relocate or euthanize a bear that has become habituated can be avoided.
“We work with landowners to ‘kill the conflict, not the carnivore’,” Kari said. “It can be very emotionally taxing for the bear managers doing the on-the-ground work. Our biologists work tirelessly to get ahead of and prevent bears from getting into conflict, but we can’t prepare a landscape conducive to coexistence between bears and humans by ourselves, we can only provide the tools and knowledge. The possibility of coexistence lies in the residents and communities that live on the landscape.”
The tools provided by the Wildlife Management Program can be remarkably effective. A study conducted in the valley in 2020 found that chicken coops protected by an electric fence had a nearly zero percent chance of being raided by bears or other carnivores. Unprotected, that risk rose by 50 percent. The Program also runs a bear spray distribution program that allows anyone with a Tribal ID, conservation or fishing license to purchase a can of bear spray for only $20, as well as a bear-resistant garbage can loaner program.
A community comes together to collect fruit and prevent conflicts
While the behavior shifts required to stay safe in bear country take effort, bear awareness can also be a fun endeavor. CSKT’s Fall Wildlife Festival embodies this by helping residents remove fruit attractants and turn it into cider, all while celebrating the animals that make the Mission Valley so special.
Starting in 2021, with support from a Vital Ground grant, the festival celebrates the beginning of fruit gleaning season, the delicious products made with apples that have been collected and the importance of that effort in reducing conflicts with bears. After another grant from Vital Ground allowed them to purchase cider presses, Kari reported that 800 pounds of fruit were pressed into nearly 60 gallons of apple cider at the festival.
Across the rest of the reservation and fruit season, CSKT manages a social media page where community members can match their excess fruit with folks willing to harvest and use it. There are also drop-off locations where fruit is collected and distributed to local food banks, farmers and breweries. During the first year of the program around 2,400 pounds of fruit were collected and successfully kept from becoming waste or attracting conflicts.
Kari views community-wide exchanges like these as an essential component to making the Flathead Reservation a bear-safe place. If bears get a food reward and learn bad behavior on one property, they can become a problem for surrounding neighbors, even if those folks are securing their attractants and making loud noises to deter bears who wander through their backyards. People are also more likely to adopt bear-safe practices if they see them working effectively in their neighborhood or hear about them from fellow community members.
“What really starts to gain traction is if people see their neighbors using electric fences, or people see their neighbors getting a bear resistant garbage can,” Kari said. “That is really more of a motivator for folks to alter their behavior.”
Vital Ground for grizzlies in the Mission Valley
Bears have always been part of the ecological and cultural landscape in the Northern Rockies. Since time immemorial, the area that now makes up the Flathead Reservation has been home to grizzlies, black bears, gray wolves, Canada lynx, red foxes and other large predators who lived alongside the Salish and Kootenai tribes, as well as other Indigenous peoples. Grizzlies in particular evolved in the open and lush meadows and valley bottoms of places like the Mission Valley, moving between these lowlands and the mountains above based on seasonal food availability. Grizzlies have long frequented the high country of the Mission Mountains, where a tribally-designated wilderness area is closed to all human travel during a portion of the summer that involves intense grizzly feeding on army cutworm moths. But Kari said that the growing grizzly population of the NCDE is now expanding back into the valley bottom habitat that they once roamed in abundance.
“As grizzly populations recover, they are rediscovering their historical range,” Kari said. “Bears seek very specific natural resource features because of the types of plants and foods that grow there… We see the most human-bear conflict in homes that fall within a 200 meter buffer to streams, creeks, rivers. Essentially in areas where humans are living in the same landscape that bears are seeking for natural resources.”
In our efforts to promote connectivity between the NCDE population and the broader grizzly population of the Northern Rockies, Vital Ground works on conflict prevention and habitat protection as two essential prongs of the same mission. We recently partnered with Flathead Land Trust to help protect a crucial tract of land that is a travel corridor for grizzlies moving between the Mission Mountains and valley bottom. And we’ve partnered with Kari and the rest of CKST’s Wildlife Management team for multiple years to enable their wide array of effective and necessary conflict prevention programs.
Coexistence truly takes a whole community. Just like people must shift their behavior and infrastructure to prevent conflicts, bears in the valley are also adjusting to human presence. Kari said biologists have noticed more grizzlies shifting to nocturnal activity in the valley bottom.
“They’ve learned that avoidance mechanism,” Kari said. “We do have bears that travel really close to homes and people don’t even know that they’re there because they’re really good at staying out of trouble and doing natural things that bears should be doing. As long as we can reduce our attractants on the landscape, the less opportunity there is for them to get into some bad behaviors.”
For Kari, this provides hope that coexistence is and will continue to be a reality between people and bears in the Mission Valley. But it is a hope that requires our ongoing responsibility and commitment to preventing conflicts. Vital Ground is grateful to have steadfast and knowledgeable partners in CSKT’s Wildlife Management Program, and in conservationists like you who enable this life-supporting work.