[Music comes up with two beeps]
Toogee: “When I get a bear out from under a house I use a paintball gun and firecrackers.
[Sound of paintball gun]
Toogee: “And what you want to do is you want to stress that bear out.”
[paintball gun sound continues]
Toogee: “What I’m trying to instill in that bear is that humans are not safe to be around. We want them to think that we're the biggest jerks on the planet and then they'll try and avoid us.”
Ezra: More than 25 thousand bears live in California and Nevada. Biologists aren’t sure exactly how many live in Tahoe, but there are about 20 that within the city limits of South Lake.
Toogee: “They're not grabbing the lettuce and the celery. They're grabbing the butter they're grabbing the meat and they're grabbing ice cream out of the freezer.”
Ezra: That’s Toogee Sielsch, with the Sierra Wildlife Coalition. He says bears move in and out of homes and Toogee likes to keep an eye on them in his spare time. He gets calls from locals to help remove bears and he believes Tahoe needs universal rules for how to store trash. Because when there aren’t, bears like to treat trash cans like restaurants.
Toogee: “I don't think the bear population has grown that much bigger I just think they've been more comfortable living in amongst us. The human is the problem in this equation. And it's really easily fixed. It just takes not being lazy.”
Ezra: As warming temperatures increase Tahoe’s relationship with bears is forecast to get even dicier. More visitors mean more trash and increased opportunities for bears to gorge on chips and camp food.
Ezra: There are so many human-bear interactions here that Tahoe’s at a turning point. The bigger question is can action be taken now to save bears?
[music comes up slowly]
Dan: “These aren’t just theories anymore.”
Stacy: “I don’t want the snow to go away”
Simon: “Yes, Tahoe will change.”
MaryEllen: “I kind of feel like that endangered pika.”
Don: “Tahoe doesn’t control climate change it’s a victim of it.”
Ezra: From Capital Public Radio, This is Tahoeland
Laurel: “It always snowed by the third weekend in September, but that doesn’t happen anymore.”
Tom McClintock: “I want to see our forests restored. So, Tahoe doesn’t burn the way Paradise did.”
Maddie: “Chasing the snow is a huge part.”
Devin: “It’s about the lake that’s why everyone is here.”
Jesse: “There are a lot of green lakes, there aren’t very many blue ones.”
Ezra: I’m Ezra David Romero.
We’ve learned how climate change is altering how people experience Tahoe, but it’s also impacting animals. Perhaps the most visible has to do with the king of the forest.
This episode is all about bears.
Ezra: “: And you call this a bear bnb?”
Toogee: “Yeah, I like to refer to it laughingly as a bear bnb because anytime you have one of these situations where you find a bear under a house it's never just one bear that will use that space as a denning site.”
Ezra: Toogee took me beneath an abandoned home in South Lake Tahoe to see a black bear. Apparently the bear spent the winter hanging out under this house.
Toogee: “As we look under he’s straight to the back.”
Ezra: “Oh, yeah. There he is.”
Toogee: “That bear he’s about 450, 475 pounds. He’s a large male.”
Ezra: The crawl space is covered in torn garbage bags and clumps of bear hair are stuck in the woodwork.
The bear’s here because it’s so easy to find food in town. Part of the problem is that there’s no top-down, unified system in Tahoe requiring residents to secure their trash.
This is an issue that bear biologists and climate scientists say is supposed to get worse as more and more people live here and visit.
These bears are also hibernating less, if at all. They are the victims of climate change … and the consequences are deadly.
Welcome to TahoeLand.
[music ends]
Bear Video: “Oh, my god. [dogs barking] She ran away only because of the dogs. There she is.”
Ezra: You’re listening to sounds from a video of a bear wandering through Fallen Leaf Campground on the southwest side of the lake last summer.
Bear Video: “And there she goes. She’s going to leave us alone. She was coming right to us.”
Ezra: Black Bears are opportunistic … and smart … they know and remember that campsites and trash cans often mean snacks.
Stephanie: “This tends to be a campground where we see a lot of the interactions between bears and people. ”
Ezra: Stephanie Coppeto is a US Forest Service wildlife biologist that focuses on bears. This campground is near Taylor Creek (that’s where we caught bullfrogs in episode two) and it sits near a smaller lake and is close to Desolation Wilderness.
Stephanie: “We have seen an increase at least in the encounters that have been reported among bears in Lake Tahoe and we may see more encounters moving into the future particularly at our campsites and at our residences even in the winter as the climate warms.”
Ezra: Bottom line … Stephanie says bears are eating the trash that millions of visitors and residents don’t properly store or throw away. The best way to store food and trash is in a bear box … but that doesn’t always happen.
Stephanie: “So the way to lock it is to again. Attach your handle. Shove it in. And then pull up. Pull on it to make sure that it's locked.”
Ezra: But Stephanie says there’s a bigger issue than food waste in Tahoe when it comes to managing bears.
Stephanie: “Without having a uniform Lake Tahoe Basin specific ordinance for trash disposal or for food storage it does make enforcement really difficult.”
Ezra: Stephanie says people can be fined if they don’t store food properly or throw it away. But that mostly applies to the Forest Service land. There’s a lot of agencies in the Tahoe Basin that deal with bears, but they don’t have the same ordinances around trash. Yeah, and some require bear boxes after bears get into trash a couple times.
Stephanie says there’s a lot of work going on in Tahoe to close the gaps in bear management like the study analyzing bear scat, to see where bears are from. But she says, if something doesn’t happen soon on a Tahoe wide level, bears will suffer. Because she says it’s tough to retrain a bear that’s used to eating human food. She says the end result is death.
Stephanie: “If a bear begins to damage property or makes contact with a human that bear can be euthanized. And that's the worst consequence of all of our bad behaviors. Humans are the solution and the problem in keeping bears wild.”
Ezra: But there are other consequences. When there’s trash around bears wake up more often. They leave the den to get fast food and then they return to sleep.
Stephanie: “There is some evidence to suggest that bears here in certain neighborhoods arouse on garbage day during their hibernation and they know in my neighborhood Monday's garbage day and so they arouse on garbage day eat garbage and then go back into their hibernation.”
Ezra: All that waking up and gorging on pizza crusts and our trash is making bears really fat.
Stephanie: “The urban bears in Lake Tahoe are sometimes three to five times as heavy as our wildland bears. And the densities of bears in the urban areas here can be higher than in the wildland areas.”
Ezra: Stephanie and the Forest Service’s main goal with bears is to keep them wild. This is all about reducing potential conflicts between bears and people by properly storing food and trash. She says it's the simple things that can save bears, like not leaving your groceries in the car and closing your windows when you’re not home.
Stephanie: “We are we are working so hard this summer to figure out what's the best way to send that message. Because we all agree that the consequences of not getting that message out means more interactions and it means that bears could face problems in the future and we could face public safety issues in the future and so the time is now for us to work together.”
[music transitions]
Ezra: So now we know that bears are hibernating less in Lake Tahoe. Our Data Reporter Emily Zentner is here to explain more. Hey Emily.
Emily: Hey Ezra.
Ezra: So since we started working on this podcast, we were both super excited about this bear story. What did you find out?
Emily: So, the wildlife ecologist that I talked to told me that bears don’t necessarily need to hibernate. Which was really surprising for me because that's one of the things you think about when you think about bears.
Ezra: Yeah, that’s what I have learned since I was a little kid right. That bears hibernate, they eat honey, and they go to sleep.
Emily: Yeah, they go to sleep in the winter, they wake up, they go back to their normal lives. But in places like Tahoe, bears have evolved to hibernate, because there’s not enough natural bear food available during the winter.
Ezra: Yeah that’s why this is important. Hibernation is a survival mechanism for bears. There’s no food, so they go to sleep.
Emily: Yeah. and now that there’s food all year round, there’s trash, there’s human leftovers, bears are hibernating less. But it’s not just the food. As temperatures rise, the hormones that tell bears when to go to sleep don’t flow as much. For every one degree celsius that average daily winter temperatures go up, bears hibernate for six days less. That’s based on a 2017 study out of Colorado. Looking at that study, I compared it with some climate projections for the Lake Tahoe Basin and I found that bears in the Basin could be losing anywhere from 10 to 30 days of hibernation by the end of the 21st century. That’s assuming that the relationship that they found between hibernation and temperature in Colorado is similar to Tahoe and that climate and bear conditions stay the same over time.
Ezra: So bears in Lake Tahoe are getting an average of almost a month or three weeks less of sleep.
Emily: About three weeks.
Ezra: About three weeks, so this is a big change. What are the consequences on bears here? Is it serious?
Emily: One problem is that, as I said, bears evolve to hibernate for a reason. When they wake up early, even though it’s warm enough that they wake up, that doesn’t mean the ecosystem is producing those fruits and nuts and berries that bears would naturally be eating. That means they have to go looking for human food to survive. Here’s wildlife ecologist Rae Wynn Grant.
Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: “Human foods or unnatural foods are playing a huge role into whether bears are able to survive the absence of hibernation in a in a year with a climate difference. But in terms of the natural ecology of these animals that can be that could be a death sentence for them.”
Emily: And she’s not the only researcher who says that this is a life-or-death problem for bears.. Heather Johnson, who is one of the biologists involved in the study I mentioned earlier, said it’s really dire.
Heather Johnson: “As human development really expands, and bears and people are interacting more, this longer active season for bears, you know bears being awake for more of the year, it’s their interactions with people that really put them at risk for higher rates of mortality.”
Ezra: Yeah and all of these interactions that I hear about whether it’s a car, or in a campground, or in a city, I hear that these bear incidents are going up. Is there data on this, or is it just anecdotal?
Emily: There’s not really good data recording this. And that’s because they only know about the incidents that are reported to them. So what I do know is that there were 850 incidents reported to the California and Nevada Departments of Wildlife in 2018 and that’s across the whole states of California and Nevada.
Ezra: But what about summer time? When there can be as many as many as 100 thousand people in the Lake Tahoe Basin on any given day.
Emily: There’s a bump in incidents then but we don’t know if that’s because that’s when bears are active or if that’s because as you said, there are tons of people in the Tahoe Basin, they might not be super comfortable with bears, they might see a bear just walking in the forest and feel the need to call it in. So that might be why there’s that bump then.
Ezra: Yeah, I saw 3 bears while I was reporting on this podcast. One on the west side, one on the south lake and one in the east side and I didn’t report any of them.
Emily: Yeah, I grew up in a bear area and we never called anyone when we saw a bear going through our trash. We just locked the trash up better next time. But some people are more comfortable around bears than others. And for bears and people to live together in Tahoe, people need to feel safe. Some experts are worried that when bears hibernate less and we have these incidents going up, that that could make people less excited about bear conservation. And a lot of work went into protecting Tahoe’s bears and that could all be undone by this.
Ezra: Alright, so if you want to learn more, head to capradio.org/tahoelandbears and we have a great video of Toogee Sielsch evicting a bear in South Lake Tahoe. Thanks Emily for explaining.
Emily: Thanks, Ezra.
Ezra: So if you’ve been listening to this podcast, then you know we like to take what we’ve learned about climate change in Tahoe and show how it applies to situations all over the world. And that holds true globally for bears. For many it’s terrible, like black bears where the end result is death. For others it could give them more space to live and explore.
It’s actually a bear species that’s become the face of climate change. Yeah, I’m talking about the polar bear. You’ve seen the pictures. The ones in the media of starving bears stranded on a slab of floating ice.
Stephen: “They are the canary in the coal mine, although in this case it's the uh the Big Bear and the ice mine.”
Ezra: Stephen Leahy says polar bars are on the frontlines of climate change. He’s written about them for National Geographic.
Stephen: “: We know the ice in the Arctic is melting there's almost a million square miles less ice even in winter now than there used to be. Polar bears have to have ice because that's the only way they can hunt a seal. They wait for the seals to pop their head up through their breathing holes and then they smack him on the head and haul them out.”
Ezra: Stephen says there are around 20 to 30 thousand polar bears in 19 subpopulations on Earth. And these bears need ice … but the ice is melting.
Stephen: “The numbers are going down and it's primarily linked to the lack of food availability because the ice is retreating. The ice melts sooner in the spring and it means they have to get off the ice and then they're fasting period is much much longer.”
Ezra: Unlike Tahoe bears, Polar bears don’t hibernate. They just hang out, even when there’s no ice. Stephen says research shows that many bears are 30 percent lighter..
Stephen: “That has a big impact on their ability to have young and be able to take care of them. The statistics are very concerning about the future of polar bears because we know the ice is going to continue to shrink.”
Ezra: One of the most notable polar bears stories that Stephen covered was over a controversial video of a starving polar bear published by Nat Geo in 2017.
Stephen: “It was a very thin bedraggled polar bear that was basically on its last legs.”
Ezra: The footage reached around 2.5 billion people. But what really sparked debate was suggesting that the polar bear’s condition was a direct result of climate change.
Stephen: It's hard to say what caused its condition. It became controversial because it was suggested this is what climate change looks like. And yeah for some bears it probably is, but we can’t say for sure that particular bear was in trouble because of climate change.”
Ezra: Stephen says the media coverage, plus new research linking the retreat of sea ice and polar bears to climate change, tells us something.
Stephen: “Polar bears need the Arctic ice as much as we do. We need the Arctic ice to keep our weather from going completely crazy. It's one of the major drivers of our entire climate system, the ice in the Arctic. If we lose that ice we're gonna be in big trouble along with the polar bears.”
[music transitions]
Ezra: Environmental journalist Gloria Dickie is writing a book about other species of bears impacted by climate change. It’s pretty interesting, let's talk about bears around the globe.
Gloria: “Bears are facing a whammy of threats. Whether it's climate change whether it's habitat loss or the wildlife trade.”
Ezra: We already know about black bears and polar bears. But there are eight species of bears on earth. And not all are affected by climate change Gloria says. Such as panda bears, sun bears and Aisan black bears.
But Gloria says the spectacled bear that lives in the cloud forests of the Andes is moving to higher elevations. The species is intensely shy. And it kinda looks like a black bear, but smaller, with whitish yellow rings around its eyes.
Gloria: “As the temperatures get hotter the range is shifting. And unfortunately not all species can adapt to that. It’s expected that through climate changes impact on the cloud forest that will eventually impact the spectacled bear as well.”
Ezra: And then there’s the sloth bear that lives in the forest of India. Gloria says, they are impacted by climate change, but more indirectly. The issue has to do with competition for resources with humans. Sloth bears have a shaggy black coat, a cream-colored snout, and their chest is often marked with a whitish “V” or “Y”.
Gloria: “There's a huge human population and there's a lot of encroachment on habitat. As temperatures get hotter in India you might see diminished production in the forests and then you have people killing the sloth bears in sort of competition over mawa flowers or firewood and things like that.”
Ezra: Of course, then there’s grizzly bears. Like black bears, climate change is getting in the way of them hibernating. Gloria says for every 1 degree Celsius that minimum winter temperatures increase bears hibernate for six fewer days. She says grizzlies are often waking up as much as a month early.
Gloria: “Some of the things that we're seeing is people who are recreating you know in places like Banff National Park or Yellowstone are being surprised by these grizzly bears that are suddenly out of their dens. I think this year in Banff there was a kind of an unusual winter bear warning to stay off the cross-country ski trails because of that.”
Ezra: But at the same time, warming temperatures could also give grizzly bears more suitable habitat.
Gloria: “There’s an expectation that basically as polar bear kind of lose their range in the north the grizzly bears will be moving northward and becoming the new king of the north so to speak. We're already seeing grizzly bears on ice flows at times of the year believe it or not. They have a pretty high adaptive capacity they can live in those kind of harsh northern environments perhaps not quite as far as polar bears but certainly further south of that.”
Ezra: We know trash is a threat to bears. And part of the reason is because there’s no regional plan or rules for how to keep bears out of it. And communities that have rules don’t strictly enforce them.
This is a symptom of Tahoe being managed by so many agencies. And as the area warms and more people visit and move here, the garbage issue is supposed to get worse.
C: arolyn: “Hey bear.””
Ezra: “I don’t think he’s going to come out if he’s in there”
Carolyn: “No, we would be hearing huffing by now.”
Ezra: I’m with Carolyn Stark and we’re looking into a culvert going under a street. She’s a volunteer with an advocacy group called The Bear League. We’re in a bear quarter on the north side of the lake in Incline Village. We’re surrounded by cabins and multi-million dollar homes.
C: arolyn: “Here's some bear poop.”
Ezra: “All right there. That's bear poop.”
Carolyn: “Dried up bear poop, could be coyote but…”
Ezra: “Well this is pretty big. That's a pretty big lump for a coyote.”
Carolyn: [LAUGHS]
Ezra: Carolyn says, Incline Village is one of the only communities around the lake that got trash right. But it’s probably worth noting this is one of the wealthiest parts of Tahoe.
Carolyn: “It took 10 years but we are finding people that have trash problems. We make sure that they have to have locked garbage cans if they have any trash problems that the dumpsters that we use are all pretty much bear proof.”
Ezra: The local improvement district also gave $300 dollar rebates to homeowners if they bought a bear box.
Carolyn: “And so this is a daybed. It’s really comfortable if you ever sit in it. This is kind of where a bear hangs out.”
Ezra: Carolyn argues that 95 percent of all the human-bear interactions here are the result of garbage and food. She wants all homes in Tahoe to have bear boxes. But she says not a lot of people like this idea.
Carolyn: “People come up from the Bay Area and they are scared when they see a bear or a bobcat and they don't think they should live here. I've had conversations with people saying bears don't belong here because we live in parcel land. We don't live in acreage and so bear should not be an Incline Village but bears have always been here. This is their home. And you know you remove one bear another bear will move in.”
Ezra: Carolyn doesn’t agree with how some agencies manage bears … so much so that she’s been involved in multiple lawsuits. She thinks some officials are overzealous and trap and kill bears too often. She wants to see more enforcement against people.
Carolyn: “You know if a bear is coming around you know six seven times it's because there is attractants there it's not because it's a bad bear or bears just wants food and if there is food available they're going to come around.”
[music comes in above quote]
Carolyn: “For the most part, many of the people here they love the bears. They you know want no harm done to the Bears. But it doesn't take a lot of people to kind of be vocal and really be intolerant of bad behavior which you know bears are going to come around if we're doing the wrong things.”
Ezra: So here we are again at the end of the episode and the outlook is grim. Climate change equals more human-bear conflicts and we discussed the end result isn’t good for bears. But there is a sliver of hope, the agencies that manage bears say they want to work together and if they actually do perhaps that can save bears lives.
But at the end of the day Tahoe’s a wild place. This is the bears home, they were here first and it seems like humans forget that.
[music transitions]
Ezra: Don’t forget to stick around after the credits for a Tahoe Tidbit on possibly the cutest creature in all of Tahoe.
TahoeLand is edited by Nick Miller. Sally Schilling is our podcast producer. Our Digital Editor is Chris Hagan. Emily Zentner is TahoeLand’s data reporter. Kacey Sycamore is collecting your questions about Tahoe and answering them.
Our web site is built by Renee Thompson, Veronika Nagy and Katie Kidwell.
Linnea Edmeier is the executive editor. Joe Barr is our Chief Content Officer. And our associate producer is Gabriela Fernandez.
Our music is by artist CharlestheFirst. He’s from Tahoe.
To make sure you don’t miss any episodes, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
Check out our website capradio.org/tahoeland for videos, photos, additional stories and more.
I’m Ezra David Romero…. Thanks for listening to TahoeLand... from Capital Public Radio.
[music comes to an end]
[sound of footsteps on dirt, wind]
Gabriela: Imagine hiking through the mountains of Lake Tahoe. You hear footsteps hitting the dirt, the wind ringing past you, pine trees swaying ... and then a loud squeaky noise.
[as ambi rises, the pika call is revealed]
Gabriela: That is the American Pika.
Gabriela: I’m Gabriela Fernandez, Associate Producer for Tahoeland.
[squeak]
While we were working on this podcast, people kept mentioning this small, furry mammal that kinda looks like a combination between a mouse and a rabbit.
The Pika lives high in the mountains that surround Lake Tahoe, under piles of rock. Some people think they’re a rodent, but they’re not.
[squeak]
My colleague and Data Reporter Emily Zentner pointed out that the little creatures closely resemble a popular character from my childhood.
[Pikachu noise: ‘pika, pika, pikachu!!]
Gabriela: Alright everyone, I’m not from this part of California so I didn’t know what a Pika was and the visual of Pikachu definitely helped, even if the character isn’t actually based on them..
David: “They're an adorable little animal. They're super cute.”
Gabriela: That’s David Wright, he works for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
David: “You know, they hop and run from rock to rock and they'll bark at you. That's a cool thing about doing biology on them is you can identify them by their call.”
[cue pika noise]
Gabriela: The not so cool thing is that the pikas are under threat: as temperatures begin to rise, they are migrating to higher elevations.
David: “it's only in the coolest places that you find that the pikas are persistent year after year after year.”
Gabriela: The Pikas are also herbivores that thrive off of vegetation. But there’s a problem. David says when we face extreme drought, in some places the Pika has completely disappeared due to the lack of plant life.
David: “They're retreating in the face of warming temperatures. If you're familiar with the area, they ultimately went extinct on that Pluto mountain area.”
Gabriela: That area is in the Northern part of Tahoe... So here’s the big question… are these cute little guys gonna go extinct?
David: “We will probably see them retreat to some of the very highest elevations. Maybe they'll only be found in the southern Sierra in California. I don't know. But it's a shame to see them lost from areas that I like to go and hear their little bark.”
Gabriela: Next time you’re on a hike, look out for these little critters high in the mountains … at least while they’re still around..
For Tahoeland… I’m Gabriela Fernandez.
[squeak]
