Glenwood Springs – Bear 919 had a thing for Aspen night life.
Last summer after dark, the female bruin would pad into Aspen and follow the same circular route through several residential neighborhoods in search of snacks. She did that nightly until the high-country serviceberries and choke cherries ripened, and then she made a beeline up Smuggler Mountain. She spent 18 days gorging on her natural diet.
Wildlife researchers know that because of a unique satellite-tracking study in its second year in the bear-heavy Roaring Fork Valley.
Ten valley bears have been outfitted with collars that pinpoint their movements every 15 minutes using a Global Positioning System device. It’s the first time such an urban study has been done on bears in Colorado and the first study to collect so much information in the country.
“I don’t know of any other study that is tracking this intense of data,” said Stewart Breck, a research wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Research Center.
The center is conducting the four- year study with the Colorado Division of Wildlife and Colorado State University.
Last year, six bears around Aspen and Glenwood Springs were outfitted with collars holding a battery pack and data-collection device the size of a can of car wax. So far this year, four bears have been collared, and researchers hope to collar 11 more.
The collars used previously had to be retrieved from tranquilized bears to download the data. But this year, the collars are capable of both sending and receiving data, which enables researchers to quickly locate certain bears and go to their in-town hangouts to determine whether they are eating dog food or dinner leftovers.
“We’re finding out stuff about bears we didn’t know, and we’ve been studying bears since the 1970s,” said John Broderick, a DOW terrestrial biologist.
Sharon Baruch-Mordo, a CSU graduate student who is conducting the bear tracking for her doctorate, characterized the study as “just short of getting into a bear’s mind.”
The study also is designed to track human attitudes.
Because the tracking devices pinpoint bears’ urban hangouts, the study zeroes in on humans who aren’t bear-proofing their homes.
Despite concerted educational campaigns about that, more than two dozen bears have had to be killed in the past two years for returning to populated areas in the Roaring Fork Valley to feed.
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
