Fuzz Page 3
Our victim’s injuries, Joel tells us, have been recreated on one of the manikins. It’s not here at the scene, but we’ll examine it in class tomorrow morning when we try to establish linkage.
And that brings us to beer o’clock again. Joel collects the props and the evidence flags and the polyethylene bear, and we all troop back along the road and up to our hotel rooms to change. By the time I come back downstairs, my group has gathered at a small sports bar behind the blackjack tables. They’re intent on hockey, Oilers versus the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“Hey,” I try. “Shouldn’t that be Toronto Maple Leaves?” I can’t compete with hockey, so I go for a walk. I end up at a Cabela’s outfitters. I don’t hunt, but I enjoy the taxidermy. This outlet has an outstanding mountain diorama and a musk ox on top of the dressing rooms. Also a Gun Library, which, I discover, contains used guns, not books.
The man behind the counter waits for me to say something. I ask about getting a library card. “You can’t borrow these guns,” he says. “They’re for sale.”
“Then it’s not much of a library, is it?” Seems like I should probably call it a night.
The manikin from our crime scene comes with some extras. Joel has just emptied onto a tabletop a bag of realistic moulage bear stomach contents: an ear and an eye and a strip of scalp with part of a mohawk haircut. These are passed around among our group. It’s early in the morning for such things. Doughnuts sit untouched.
The stomach contents are a match for what’s missing on our manikin’s head, suggesting that indeed the bear, not the wolf, was behind the attack. The mohawk seems like a fanciful touch, but turns out not to be. Joel reveals that our scenario from yesterday was based on an actual attack—real bear, real man, real mohawk. Joel investigated this case in 2015. All the WHART manikins, in fact, represent not just real wounds but real attack victims.
Joel brought along photographs from the actual attack scene. One shows the victim’s backside. The largest wound, a raw, gaping, messy chomp, is to the buttocks. The man had been sleeping in one-piece long johns, and the flap, Joel says, must have opened while the bear was dragging him. “So that’s why there’s feeding right there.” After a moment, Joel adds, “You know the one with the bear paw prints on it? On the butt flap?” This is apparently a common item in Canada, because several of my group mates nod. “That’s what he was wearing.”
There’s a clean set of bite marks on the manikin’s shoulder. From the position of the upper and lower canine marks there, we can tell that the man had been sleeping on his back. The bear, Joel surmises, came upon the sleeping figure, maybe licked the salts from his skin. The man woke up and probably made some noise. “So the bear figures, Well, I either finish this or I run away. He chose to finish it.”
Meanwhile, what was inside the stomach of our other suspect, the wolf shot by the sheriff when he arrived on the scene? Gum wrappers and tinfoil. No human tissue or clothing. Case closed. No DNA analysis was needed.
Once the forensics is completed and the perpetrator known, what happens next? If this bear hadn’t been shot near the scene of the attack, what would have been its fate? Kevin Van Damme talked about this after a lecture. Prison isn’t an option. Canadian zoos won’t take bears older than three months, because they tend to pace and because zoos generally have enough bears. Capital punishment is what happens. “If a bear treats a person as food, it will do it again,” Van Damme said. “I have spent twenty-six years as a predator attack specialist. I know some of you disagree with me, but if it hurts a person, it’s going to die.”
As any criminologist can tell you, prevention is better than punishment. The safest thing for both species is to keep them apart. Don’t let bears learn to associate humans with easy meals. Require that people in bear country secure their garbage. Tell them to stop feeding birds and leaving dogfood on the porch. The man in the long johns lived in the woods, where there was no garbage pickup. Trash likely piled up outside the trailer. The tinfoil and gum wrappers in the wolf’s stomach suggest that this was a place wild animals had become comfortable scavenging for scraps. Garbage is a killer.
* Canadian for “Fish and Game Department.”
† Scientists with the long-ago Division of Economic Ornithology used stomach contents as evidence in cases of birds accused of raiding farms, hunting stock, and commercial fishing operations. A 1936 U.S. Department of Agriculture report provides examples: eiders accused of decimating scallop beds, yellow-crowned night herons shot by froggers when in fact the birds had been eating crayfish, hunters killing marsh hawks because they thought they were preying on quail. In each case, the birds were exonerated by their stomach contents, a happy outcome for all except of course the individuals examined, who gave their stomachs that others might live. Maryland’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center housed a collection of thousands of glass jars of bird stomach contents, until pressing storage needs triggered a massive emesis into a Patuxent dumpster.
2
BREAKING AND ENTERING AND EATING
How Do You Handle a Hungry Bear?
Stewart Breck is a tall, narrow plank of a man. His arms don’t stray far from his sides as he walks, and he carries no backpack or bag to break up the long vertical plane he occupies in space. You notice this when you walk behind him, which I’ve been doing a lot of because his stride covers several city blocks. Though personable, his demeanor, too, tilts to restraint. Over the course of the day I’ve spent with him, he has not raised his voice or gesticulated memorably or used a bleepable word. He’s composed, considerate, reasonable. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand how I was a little shaken when Stewart Breck, a moment ago, went, “Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?” and his arms shot out from his sides, where they remain, palms up, the universal gesture of exasperation.
Because I am, again, lagging behind, I don’t at first see what Breck sees. Now I do: two fat trash bags ripped open, with food scraps spilling out onto the pavement. It is 3:30 a.m., bear time in the back alleys of compact, restaurant-dense downtown Aspen, Colorado. The sound of Breck’s approaching SUV must have scared off a bear mid-scavenge. Compost and garbage are known in the parlance of human-bear conflict as “attractants.” Aspen municipal code requires both to be secured in bear-resistant containers.
“Give me a break.” Quieter now, the hands back at his sides. “We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this.” This equals: multiyear, multicity research into how best to get people in the midst of bear country to properly lock up attractants, and how much difference it makes when they do. The work was funded by Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW), who get the calls when bears damage property while looting unsecured human food; Colorado State University, where Breck teaches a course in human-wildlife conflict; and Breck’s employer, the National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC), headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado.
NWRC is the research arm of Wildlife Services, which is part of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The “services” are provided mainly to ranchers and farmers who are having problems with wildlife cutting into their livelihood, and often they take the form of killing that wildlife. Breck was hired by NWRC to research nonlethal alternatives. His job gives him lots of opportunity to deploy his admirable composure. There are old-schoolers at Wildlife Services who hate him for rocking the boat, and there are animal welfare activists who hate him for not rocking it hard enough. I like him because he’s trying to stand on the impossible middle ground.
What the garbage studies showed is that reinforced, locking bear-resistant containers make a solid difference—provided people take the time to latch them properly. In an area where 80 percent of the containers were used as they’re meant to be, there were 45 human-bear conflicts over the course of the study. A similar area with only 10 percent compliance had 272 conflicts. What this says is that containers aren’t enough. You also need laws requiring people to use them, and fines for people who ignore those laws. Aspen has all of this, but there has been a reluctanc
e to follow through with the fines. Especially here, downtown. Breck has been told that in the intervening years the situation has improved.
Just now, it’s not seeming that way. Coming down the alley in that unhurried, endearingly pigeon-toed way is a full-grown black bear. Breck and I are standing near his vehicle, which is parked twenty feet back from the mess. The bear nears the garbage, which has been its focus until this moment, and then it looks over at us. It clacks its jaws, an indication that it’s uneasy. For here are two staring humans, one with some good height to him, at a time of night when humans are rarely about. On the other hand: kitchen scraps from Campo de Fiori! The bear considers the situation a moment longer, then lowers its head to eat.
Because there’s a lot of eating to be done. It’s early fall, the time of year when black bears eat with purpose and abandon, to construct the fat they will live off in their dens over the winter.* A hyperphagic black bear doubles or even triples its daily calorie count, taking in as much as 20,000 calories. As omnivores, bears happily eat a variety of foods; during hyperphagia, what they are drawn to most powerfully is a concentrated source. They want to take in lots of calories without having to burn lots of calories wandering around looking for calories. The mountains around Aspen have always supplied that: acorn-dropping oak brush, fruiting serviceberry and chokecherry trees, the outrageous fecundity of crabapple trees. Come the 1950s and ’60s, the skiers began to move in. Bears looked up from their nuts and berries and went, Hurunh? Birdseed hanging on a tree? Bag of kibble sitting on a deck? Yes, please. Soon they ventured into town, following the humans, because the humans provide. The alleys behind Aspen’s multitudinous restaurants are concentrated-food-source nirvana.
Breck nudges me. Another bear is coming down the alley, this one darker and slightly smaller. The lighter, dominant bear turns its attention to the newcomer and makes a low, rumbly sound. You may have those hearts of romaine and that spinach gnocchi, but do not come near my grilled sustainable Skuna Bay salmon.
Breck raises his phone to take a picture, which surprises me. This is a man who uses the word routine to describe the act of hand-darting a hibernating black bear to replace its tracking collar. It turns out he’s not photographing bears. He’s photographing irony. “Look at the lid.” He aims his flashlight at the wheeled compost cart lying, open, on its side. The molded-plastic lid features a bear face, and inches from this decorative bear face is the face of the actual bear now enjoying the contents of this certified bear-resistant container that has failed to resist it.
“They jump on them,” Breck says, “and they pop open.”
Or the locking mechanism may be broken. This was the case with another of this same model of compost cart farther along the alley, which we saw earlier in the day. Breck walked up and lifted the lid on fifty reeking bananas. “Be sure to latch,” chided a sticker. “A bear’s life depends on it.” In the next alley over, Breck led me to an uncovered vat of used cooking grease. It was as tall and big around as a drinking fountain, and bears sometimes use it like one. Breck has seen paw prints in grease leading away down the alley.
Chapter 12.08 of Aspen’s solid-waste code, entitled “Wildlife Protection,” was modeled on that of the neighboring ski and mountain-bike resort village Snowmass. There the similarity fizzles out. Snowmass Animal Services/Traffic Control consists of Tina White and Lauren Martenson, and they are on it. “We ticket everyone,” White told me when we met yesterday. She recently put together a slide presentation in Spanish for restaurant kitchen staff, many of whom hadn’t realized what happens to bears that start raiding dumpsters when people neglect to lock them. Her efforts have been working. It’s been several years since a bear causing problems in Snowmass was, as White put it, “pulled out of the mix.” At the time of my visit, Aspen was up to nine for the year. Then again, Aspen is three times as populous, with four times the number of restaurants.
Aspen’s garbage violations are handled by community response officers, five in all. Breck and I met with their representative, Charlie Martin, yesterday morning in a conference room at the Aspen Police Department. Charlie wore a black and yellow uniform, and a pair of socks on which rainbows alternated with unicorns. “It’s not Friday and I wasn’t on bike patrol,” he said, mysteriously, when I commented on them. Charlie listed some of the things his team was already struggling to keep up with when bear-related garbage infractions were added to the list: traffic violations, barking dogs, idling construction vehicles, 911 calls, rabid bats, lost and found, sidewalk snow, jump starts, vehicle lockouts, community picnics, and removing dead deer from roadways.
Charlie was a trifle defensive about the alley situation. “We’ve passed out almost ten thousand dollars in tickets this year.” The fines for leaving garbage or compost unsecured range from $250 to $1,000. Breck and I could have matched the year’s total in one day. Except that, as Charlie pointed out, the fines wouldn’t stick. “You’ve got multiple parties sharing one dumpster,” Charlie said, referring to containers in both condo developments and restaurant back alleys. “You write someone a ticket, and they’ll say, ‘It was someone else. We left at ten p.m., and we locked it. Prove to me that it wasn’t locked when we left.’ ”
Aspen’s waste management companies are, by law, required to assign a number to each compost and trash container, and to keep a database that links these numbers to the person or company responsible for keeping the contents secured and paying a fine if they are not. Aspen contracts with five of these companies, and none appears to have set up such a system. (Snowmass does its own pickup. Also, Tina White will happily climb into a dumpster and rummage through a trash bag for mail with a name and address. She has heard people refer to her and Lauren as “the bear bitches.”)
You read about this kind of thing over and over in communities that have tried to switch to bear-resistant containers. Generally speaking, waste management companies are fiercely concerned with their bottom line, and not so fiercely concerned with the welfare of bears. The containers need to fit the lifts on the trucks, which means that on top of the expense of the bins, there will be the expense of new trucks or retrofitted trucks, and either way it’s money the companies would prefer not to spend. And the people who respond to the bear calls are not the people who draft the ordinances or the people who run the garbage companies. It’s a stinking mess.
While wandering the alleys this afternoon, Breck peered over the lip of a dumpster marked CARDBOARD ONLY. At the bottom were French fries, an olive, and some squeezed lemon halves. As it’s written, city code doesn’t require recycling dumpsters to be bear-resistant or locked or even covered, and people often toss in bags of trash. On the residential side, problems arise when homeowners rent out their property and the vacationers either aren’t told about, or don’t remember or don’t care about, the garbage laws.
Charlie agrees with Breck that Aspen needs an overhaul. It needs to replace the busted bear-resistant carts for the downtown compost and trash. It needs to resolve the shared dumpster loophole. Most importantly, it needs to hire enough staff to stay on top of things.
That would not, Breck added, be a heavy lift for Aspen. The county is home to about as many billionaires as bears. The Koch brothers have property here. The Bezos parents. The Lauder siblings. There is oil money, hedge fund money, cosmetics money, tech money, lingerie money, tinfoil money, chewing gum money. Breck believes that may be part of why the Aspen enforcement effort stumbled, that the city’s council members kowtow to its alpha residents.
Of course, the billionaires don’t manage the restaurants. That part may be Charlie’s fault. “I’ve got to live in this town too,” he said to us at one point. “And I’d like to go out to a restaurant and eat. I just gave them a thousand-dollar ticket, and I’m gonna go in their restaurant?” Aspen needs bear bitches.
The lighter-colored bear is working a crab leg, while its colleague noses through cabbage leaves. “What have these bears just learned?” Breck is saying. “I can eat garbage with peopl
e standing and watching me and nothing bad happens.” When Breck first joined the National Wildlife Research Center, he did some human-bear conflict research in Yosemite National Park. In the park’s early days, he says, staff would set up bleachers and lights around the garbage dump and charge visitors for the show: twenty or more black bears gorging and pushing each other around.
Right now we’re the people in the bleachers. We’ve just given these two a little less reason to worry about humans. As a result, they may start coming into the alley earlier or standing their ground longer. Odds are they’ll end up like the bear that dined out at the dumpster behind Steakhouse No. 316. One night not long ago, the restaurant’s manager, Roy, came out to roust the animal. Because the dumpster was set in an alcove, the bear’s escape was blocked on three sides. On the fourth side was Roy. With only one way out, the bear lunged and, quoting Charlie, “bit Roy in the ass.” According to University of Calgary professor emeritus and bear attack researcher Stephen Herrero, 90 percent of black bears that injure humans are bears that have habituated to them—that is, accustomed to their presence and lost their fear—and developed a taste for their foods.
Based on a description of the bear that Roy provided, the animal was found, trapped, and, because it had injured someone, put down. (What the description said beyond “dark hair” and “heavy-set” I can’t imagine; however, DNA from saliva on Roy’s pants was a match with the bear’s.)
Roy and his staff could have been more careful about keeping the dumpster locked and that, too, bit him in the ass. Towns-people picketed the steakhouse following the bear’s death. People don’t want bears destroyed because of other people’s neglect. If anything, they want them hazed or relocated—the two nonlethal approaches you hear about most with “conflict bears.” (There’s also electric fencing, but the prison-camp look doesn’t play well in residential areas.)