Can anything be done about the b-b-big b-b-bear problem at the landfill? - The Aspen Times

Can anything be done about the b-b-big b-b-bear problem at the landfill? | AspenTimes.com

Can anything be done about the b-b-big b-b-bear problem at the landfill?

Pitkin County, CPW skeptical on installing $1 million electric fence
Pitkin Landfill staff/Courtesy photo

What’s a chokeberry shrub in comparison to half an Italian sub? Not very satisfying and harder to find, at least according to the bears of the Pitkin County Solid Waste Center.

About 25-30 bears live in the hills surrounding the piles of compost, concrete, and garbage at the landfill. Over its 60-year existence, the bears have reproduced multiple generations of offspring dependent on human food that feast on the working face — the trash — of the landfill.

The bears have never been aggressive to landfill employees or visitors, but they are a nuisance to nearby neighborhoods and occasionally pose a threat. Wildlife advocates also worry about the welfare of the bears who will never return to their natural food source after feasting on human food for so long.

The county is taking another stab at what do about the bears, but the most likely solution still forces an impossible choice: 1.) build a fence to protect future bears and condemn today’s bears, or 2.) don’t build a fence and ensure the relative safety of those bears and surrounding neighborhoods but condemn future bears to dependency on human food and waste.

“What do you do with the bears? What’s going to happen to the bears? There’s no ideal situation,” said Kurtis Tesch, district wildlife manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW). “So either we let them co-exist the way they are now and continue, or we make that abrupt change, and we affect the lives of all those bears that currently live there.”

The ‘wildlife refuge’ that is the landfill

Located just off Colorado Highway 82, the landfill occupies about 260 acres of land surrounded by the rugged, low-density open spaces and communities of Old Snowmass.

Many different types of wildlife can be found on the landfill property: bald and eagles, coyotes, elk, ravens, and, of course, bears. An elk herd sleeps in compost piles at night, as the temperature of an active compost pile is about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Murder of crows and unkindness of ravens pick over piles of compost and garbage, looking for a snack or something shiny.

Tesch said the diversity of wildlife at the landfill is less about the food and more about the rural nature of the surrounding land in which the landfill sits right in the middle. He still worries about creatures like elk ingesting something they shouldn’t while sleeping in compost piles.

“I don’t think necessarily it’s all geared towards trash, and the availability of food is why it is a refuge,” he said. “I think it’s more (about the) location and surrounding development or lack thereof.”

But the bears definitely are there for the food.

Solid Waste Director Cathy Hall said bears gorge on the working face daily, picking through unsorted mounds of human trash looking for yummy-smelling, high caloric, low-effort meals of discarded human food. Plastic and other inedible materials make their way into bears’ bellies that way, too, she said.

“You can see (bear) poop with plastic bags and everything wrapped up in it,” she said. “So it’s not the best diet for them.”

And state regulations require the landfill to cover the working face with 6 inches of soil every night. That gets extremely expensive, she said, so the landfill got permission to use replacement material like shredded tires a few times a week to bury the garbage. Those microplastics also get mixed into what the bears eat as they dig through to the food.

Over their decades at the landfill, the bears have learned to cohabitate with the humans. Hall said the bears will stay in the hills out of sight until about the time the landfill closes for the proverbial dinner bell — and they can feast on trash without human interruption.

Still, customers and staff spot bears on the property regularly. To keep them from getting too close, landfill staff “haze” the bears with loud noises like car horns and, if necessary, a rubber bullet to the bum.

“They’re big scaredy cats, but they’re kind of used to humans. Some of them, (you have to) just drive up in a truck, and they run off,” she said. “We do get some young ones that haven’t really learned yet that are a little more stubborn. And then we’ll pop them in the behind. And they learn pretty quick.”

Tesch said the bears living and eating at the landfill are members of the same family who reproduce and teach their young to feed on the trash instead of their natural food sources like berries and acorns. It’s a simple cost-benefit analysis for the bears.

“Once the bear’s habituated to an unnatural food source, it won’t revert,” he said. “If they go to a trash can, they can get thousands and thousands of calories out of that one trash can, compared to how many berries or how many acorns are they going to have to eat and how much energy they’re gonna have to expel to consume that many calories. They’re smart. They’re not dumb. That’s why they’re there.”

Because of their high caloric intake, landfill bears have been able to raise larger litters of cubs than a bear feeding on natural sources. With each mother bear raising litters of 3-4 cubs, the bears live in much closer quarters than they would anywhere else, with 25-30 bears in the area.

“It’s not normal. It’s purely the amount of food source that is available. If it was a limited food source, the older (male) bears would chase the younger ones off and keep it for themselves,” Tesch said. “But since there’s such a large vast amount of supply there, they don’t feel their food sources are threatened.”

Would a fence help?

Hall and Tesch presented potential solutions to the bear problem at the Pitkin County Commissioners’ work session on Tuesday after Commissioner Chair Greg Poschman asked for an update on bears at the landfill around November.

After detailing their hazing practices of loud noises and rubber bullets, Hall presented electric fencing options.

Option 1 would be to fence just the working face, where the bears currently feed. It would cost $409,870 to fence 4,822 linear feet. That fence would need to be replaced in about five years, as the landfill is running out of space at the current working face. Their planned expansion would function for about 70 years.

Option 2 would be to fence the entire landfill. For 11,951 linear feet of electric fencing, the price would hit $1,015,835.

Neither estimate included earthwork or construction costs, which she estimated would double the price due to the going rate for construction work in the region. And, she pointed out, an electric fence would likely require a new full-time position at the landfill for continued maintenance.

Some potential remedies to cost, like using a 2-strand electric fence instead of a 7-strand, were discussed, and Tesch stressed that an electric fence would be the only way to keep bears out.

“Electric fences are the only thing that’s going to work. There’s no other fence you could put up that a bear is not going to test, not going to try to dig under, not going to try to climb over. The construction of the fence would have to be metal posts, no wood posts,” he said. “Anytime there’s overgrowth or a downed branch with anything that touches those wires, that’s going to ground it out. It (will) almost have to be a daily walk on the property testing the wires … making sure everything’s nice and tight all the way around.”

The commissioners reacted to the fencing options with skepticism. Commissioner Steve Child expressed doubt that an electric fence would hold off hungry bears, and Commissioner Patti Clapper said she was concerned about wildfire risk in the dry, shrubby landscape.

Another major issue with the fence is what it would do to the bears already there. A fence would keep out new bears and other wildlife, like the elk herd. The elk would be fine; but the landfill bears would either be fenced in and almost certainly have to be euthanized, or they’d be fenced out — which would force them to look for a new source of human food.

“The closest thing is going to be Aspen Village, where we already have issues with bears. And they will expand, they’ll go out, cross the river to Upper River Road, they’ll go to Wildcat (Ranch), they’re going to look for a food source somewhere else, they won’t revert back to natural forage,” Tesch said. “The other option would be to euthanize all the bears inside, which CPW is not supportive at all.”

Since 2019, CPW has euthanized 64 bears and relocated 22 bears in Pitkin County. Tesch said relocation is a difficult practice as bears frequently return to their former home and will never return to natural food sources once habituated to human food.

The meeting ended with no clear consensus on the fence, though support seemed dismal. Keeping dogs on landfill property also got shot down, due to cost and state regulations barring the harassment of wildlife.

Hall, who is most concerned with operations at the landfill, said it’s sad to see the bears eat trash but worries a fence would be a money pit and lead to the death of bears.

“I think it would be a constant maintenance issue. It’s a hard environment here. It’s uneven terrain. Electric fences go down. You would have to have an opening during the day, so trucks can go in and out,” she said. “I think where there’s a will, there’s a way, and these bears are smart. They’ll find a way in, … (or) it’s going to drive them elsewhere, which is going to result in their euthanasia.”

The 2024 budget for the landfill is $7.2 million. Extra money for a fence would be a supplemental budget request.

Tesch and Hall both said they are not aware of any other landfill in the state with an electric fence to keep bears out, though it’s likely a problem at every mountain landfill.

After the meeting, Tesch struggled with the choice laid out before the county. Doing nothing is a choice in this situation, but he said the upcoming transition to the new, expanded working face will allow the county and CPW to work out a solution.

“I think working something into (the five-year transition) would be the ideal time to do something,” he said. “I think we’re gifted with time on our side right now.”

Poschman is still dedicated to finding a solution for the bears, noting that Aspen and Roaring Fork Valley forebearers would be horrified at the state of the landfill.

“I think that we’ve been avoiding it because it’s a difficult thing to do, but if (a fence is) what it takes to secure our landfill from wildlife, it has to be done,” he said. “There’s no good ending in sight if we’re just going to keep feeding them.”

Living with bears

Just over a peak from the landfill is the Aspen Village neighborhood. It’s a densely packed community that has become intimately acquainted with their ursine neighbors, many of whom come from the landfill.

“Once they learn that they can find food in the neighborhood, they become a problem. They’ve ended up living under people’s desks or like hanging out up into trees or on people’s roofs,” said Kate Spenser, president of the Aspen Village Homeowners’ Association. “And our neighbor, unfortunately, had a pet rabbit that they put outside for a brief period of time, and a bear attacked and killed the rabbit.”

She said the community has hardened themselves to be pretty bear-proof. They have locked trash cans from Waste Management, many residents keep their trash bags inside or in sheds until trash day, and bird feeders are a big no-no.

Residents have doorbell-camera footage of bears sitting on their front porch, sniffing around flower pots, or just walking through the yard. It’s always startling, she said, but most folks are used to the bear encounters as a part of living in the mountains.

She could not recall a moment of aggression between a bear and a community member, but the danger is always there. Sometimes bears, especially the young ones, get too comfortable and scratch on doors or open car doors.

A fence around the landfill seemed like a good idea to her, but she worried about the county and CPW’s ability to respond to the neighborhood’s needs after the bears move from the landfill to her neighborhood.

“I just wonder what the bears who are used to being there are going to do. Are they going to come into our neighborhood? What are they going to do to help mitigate the influx of bears that are going to be looking for food, especially in the first few years?” she asked. “I’ve hiked up that mountain and looked down at the landfill and just been like, ‘Man, there really needs to be something containing it.’ I think it’s a great idea. We just have to make sure that the unintended consequences are dealt with appropriately.”

Tesch said that prevention and educating people on their behavior are the best tools in keeping bears out of neighborhoods. Removing the opportunity for a bear to acclimate to the taste and caloric value of human food is most important.

“Only by changing human behavior, you know, taking the necessary steps to protect their residents, their trash, closing windows, locking windows, locking doors, making sure trash is kept up buddy dog food away, keeping bird feeders taking them down at the appropriate times,” he said. “Those types of things is the only thing that’s going to slow down the bears taking, you know, being opportunistic about food, right.”

Still, the future of the 25-30 Pitkin County landfill bears remains uncertain.

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