It’s been a record-breaking season for bear kills in the territory, and Environment Yukon is crunching numbers to figure out how to best deal with human-wildlife conflict going forward.

“It’s been a tough season, this past season for both bears and conservation officers alike in Yukon,” Roxanne Stasyszyn, an Environment Yukon spokesperson, told reporters at a media briefing late Tuesday afternoon.

It wasn’t uncommon for conservation officers (COs) in the Dawson City area to respond to more than five bear calls in a single shift, Stasyszyn said.

Conservation officers destroyed 39 bears this season. Another 24 were killed by the public in defence of life and property.

That brings the total to 63 kills this year – a six-year high, according to new data provided by Environment Yukon.

These data span from 2012 to 2017. They touch on a number of indicators of human-bear conflict in the Yukon.

These include top attractants, the number and type of bears reported and how many bears are killed in the territory compared to other jurisdictions.

It’s statistics like these that Environment Yukon and WildWise Yukon are working to compile and analyze.

This is the first year of a new Environment Yukon program aimed at reducing human-wildlife conflict in the territory, and data are a key part of that goal.

WildWise Yukon has been contracted to work on the program.

“We’re already finding … out so much to help guide our decisions and our efforts,” Stasyszyn said.

Once finalized, the data will help the territorial and municipal governments determine how and where to invest their resources.

In doing so, they could potentially make changes to infrastructure like garbage carts and waste management, bylaws and enforcement and public education efforts.

“Evidence-based decision making is definitely the way to proceed here,” said Geoff Quinsey, the water and waste services manager with the City of Whitehorse.

The city is a partner in the new program.

In the meantime, Environment Yukon is relying on public awareness and education to reduce human-wildlife conflict – which by definition, can’t exist without humans, Stasyszyn pointed out.

Encouraging Yukoners to manage attractants – the leading cause of that conflict – is always a priority.

“Bears will be bears,” explained Aaron Koss-Young, a CO tasked specifically with preventing human-wildlife conflict.

“Everything that they do is driven by their sense of smell and their search for food from the time they come out of their dens in the spring til they den up in the fall.

“We’re not going to stop a bear from being attracted by the smell of bacon cooking in our houses; they’re going to smell that. It’s whether they can get a reward or not, and get it easily.

“If they can’t get it easily, they’re going to carry on.”

So it’s up to humans to manage those food sources that might attract bears, lead to their increased aggression around people and cause a public safety concern.

Garbage main attractant

Environment Yukon data show that garbage is the leading bear attractant, followed by human food and pets, both livestock and domestic.

Securing these can help avoid what Koss-Young called a conservation officer’s “last resort” – killing a bear.

The ideal outcome in a human-wildlife conflict is deterring the bear from contact with humans and human food sources and pushing it back to its natural environment.

COs go to great lengths to achieve this, according to Koss-Young, through deterrence techniques like loud noises or rubber bullets.

And sometimes it works – 91 bears moved on in the Yukon this year, according to Environment Yukon bear outcomes data.

If a bear doesn’t move on, another option is relocation. While this solution was applied to 10 bears this year, doing so isn’t ideal, Koss-Young explained.

“It’s not the happily-ever-after story, and it’s not the best outcome for the bear.”

When a bear is relocated, it’s transferred to a “hostile” and “alien” environment where it’s not familiar with food sources and might have to compete with larger, more aggressive bears that could kill the animal, he said.

Thus, the best option for humans and bears remains preventing a conflict between the two in the first place.

‘Wilderness City’

It’s a challenge in the Yukon, where even the most urban centre is known as the “Wilderness City”.

Respecting the fact that Yukoners and Yukon wildlife will likely always have to live side-by-side is important, according to Quinsey.

“There isn’t some finish line at which we can say, ‘we don’t need to work on this anymore,’” he said.

“We’re all at this table because we want the same things. We want to reduce the number of bears killed in conflict in the Yukon.”

The City of Whitehorse is providing a $3,500 grant to WildWise Yukon to conduct a study of strategies used in other jurisdictions to prevent human-wildlife conflict.

The non-profit will assess the suitability of those methods for Whitehorse, and share its findings with city council and city staff.

“We do believe that inevitably, the public will let our governments know what is important to them and put pressures in the right places,” said Heather Ashthorn, WildWise Yukon’s executive director.

“If they do think human-wildlife conflict is an important enough issue to make it a voting issue.”