The Best Bear Deterrent May Be Drones

FLORA LICHTMAN: For the rest of the hour, trying to solve a wildlife conundrum. What do you do when a bear keeps coming too close to people and will not take the hint to stay away? Joining me now is Wesley Sarmento, currently at the University of Montana as a research fellow, but formerly a bear management specialist for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. He recently wrote about his experiences shooing bears away in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science. Welcome to Science Friday, Wesley.

WESLEY SARMENTO: Thanks for having me, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What exactly is the job of a bear management specialist?

WESLEY SARMENTO: Really, the job of a bear management specialist is keeping bears out of trouble and keeping people and their property safe. And so that can entail a lot of different things from being really proactive and helping people secure attractants, like spilled grain or garbage, to being reactive and having to catch a grizzly bear because it’s getting into livestock or something that it shouldn’t.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Should we think of as a bear cop?

WESLEY SARMENTO: A little bit of a bear cop, yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] We increasingly are hearing about big, wild animals like bears, but also, mountain lions and wolves venturing into neighborhoods and people encountering them on trails. What’s the situation with grizzly bears?

WESLEY SARMENTO: So grizzly bears in Montana have been protected since the 1970s. And since they’ve been protected, their population has really been expanding out. And so starting in the ’70s, they were really only found in the mountains, like around Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park. But the last 40-plus years of protection has allowed the population to grow and expand out from those areas.

And so now grizzly bears are being found way out on the prairie, where they were historically, but is now very different landscape than it was 200 years ago when Lewis and Clark came through. It’s dominated by agriculture. And so a lot of crops are being grown, like wheat and barley and chickpeas. And then it’s also a lot of livestock production.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It sounds like, therefore, there are people there as well.

WESLEY SARMENTO: There’s a lot of people there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So what are the traditional tools a bear cop has at their disposal?

WESLEY SARMENTO: The traditional tools that a bare manager has are a vehicle to run bears off and also, a shotgun to use non-lethal deterrents, like cracker shells, which is basically, like an exploding firecracker, beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets, and then also, some other things, like air horns and that sort of stuff.

FLORA LICHTMAN: In this article, you are describing a new potential tool. Will you tell us about it?

WESLEY SARMENTO: Yeah. So the new potential tool is a drone. People can just go and buy really capable drones right off the internet. And these drones are capable of 30 minutes of flight. You can fly them in high winds, and they even have thermal capabilities, so you can fly them at night.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And what’s the aim? What are you trying to do? Is it to scare the bear? Or what’s the ideal?

WESLEY SARMENTO: So there’s two objectives for scaring the bears away. That’s just hazing the animal. And hazing basically means to chase an animal. Let’s get the bear away from somewhere where we don’t want it.

And then the second objective is a longer-term effect that we call aversive conditioning. An aversive conditioning basically means teaching an animal to not want to do something.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And is it working with the drones?

WESLEY SARMENTO: The evidence that I came up with in my area found that it was very effective. In 91% of the cases where I used drones, the bears did successfully move away from where they needed to be. And there was also evidence for that long-term aversive conditioning, where older bears needed less hazing. And also, hazing events decreased over each calendar year.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I assume this is really helpful because it doesn’t also put the bear at risk or you at risk.

WESLEY SARMENTO: Absolutely. By us hazing bears, that keeps bears out of trouble. And that keeps them from coming near people, where they could get into trouble, or someone could shoot them in self-defense, or they get hit on the road. So it’s better for them long term. But then it’s also a lot safer hazing a bear with a drone. Because I can do it from the safety of my vehicle instead of going out on foot, like I used to do, and making myself available to where I could get attacked by a bear.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Before we let you go, I’m so interested in this job. What kind of temperament do you need to be a good bear cop?

WESLEY SARMENTO: You need to be calm in all kinds of situations. Most importantly, you need really good people skills. Because the bears are pretty easy to deal with. But people can be very difficult to deal with, particularly people that don’t want bears around or don’t like bears whatsoever. And so being able to put yourself in those people’s shoes and understand their perspective and where they’re coming from is essential for the job, so you can relate to them, and you can empathize with them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Not just empathy for the bears, but for the people, too.

WESLEY SARMENTO: You do need a lot of empathy for the people.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wesley Sarmento, former bear management specialist for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, now at the University of Montana as a research fellow, thanks for joining us.

WESLEY SARMENTO: Thank you again, Flora.

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