Bear Activity in National Park Increases

The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore plans to step up its education campaign about the do’s and don’ts of living in bear country. Park officials hope that will end this past summer’s encounters between campers and bears. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mike Simonson reports:

Transcript

The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore plans to step up its education campaign about
the do’s and don’ts of living in bear country. Park officials hope that will end this past summer’s encounters between campers and bears. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mike
Simonson reports.


With about 30 bears on Stockton Island, some of them decided to swim for a less-
crowded scrounging area. So, this summer, campers reported bears rummaging through
their food on neighboring islands – forcing the Park Service to close a couple of
campsites.


Apostle Islands Resource Specialist Julie Van Stappen says the bear population may be a
little crowded. And even though there has been an annual hunt of bears since the mid-1990’s, she doesn’t expect much help thinning out the bear population from hunters.


“Very few people do it. You have to get out to the islands and there’s no motorized equipment allowed, so it would be a very different hunt.”


Next summer, Van Stappen says instead of moving bears or closing campsites, the best
bet is to educate campers about storing food, and not attracting bears in the first place.
She says that would be the simplest way to end the close encounters of the bear kind on
the Apostle Islands.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mike Simonson.