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Wednesday, April 11, 2007
The wild west
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Rocky Barker and Patrick Orr - Idaho Statesman
Edition Date: 04/11/07
State game wardens have set traps near a home in Tetonia where a grizzly bear attacked a man Tuesday.
The 33-year-old man was flown by helicopter to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls where he is in stable condition.
Tetonia is about 40 miles east of Rexburg at the foot of the Teton Mountain Range.
So far, the grizzly remains at large, but officials suspect it will return to the moose carcass it was feeding on just prior to the attack.
The man was walking outside his home -- a wooded subdivision with homes located an acre or more away from each other -- around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday while trying to figure out what his dog was barking at when the bear charged him and mauled him.
The man's home is within the habitat of the Yellowstone grizzly bear, which is scheduled to lose the protection of the endangered species act within weeks.
Under the act, the species is listed as threatened and can be killed only under strict guidelines.
Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials said they have the authority to kill the bear if they find it, although they said they first want to trap the bear to make sure that they have the right animal.
"After the well being of the victim the safety of the public is our top concern," said Jon Heggen, Fish and Game's chief of enforcement.
Officials suspect the bear was instinctively protecting his food source when it encountered the man, who was only 50 feet from his home, said Teton County Sheriff Kim Cook.
The man was outside alone; his wife was inside, Cook said.
Steve Schmidt, the regional supervisor for Idaho Fish and Game's Upper Snake Region, said the man was doing well when he talked to him in the hospital Wednesday morning.
"He was in a lot better condition than I expected," Schmidt said. "The bear charged him and knocked him down (but) he was smart enough to roll into a ball."
Schmidt said the bear "chewed (the man) up pretty good" but said the man was already on his way to recovery.
The man, whose name was not released Wednesday, told officials he briefly saw the grizzly in the fading light Tuesday night before it knocked him down and began mauling him.
The man sustained injuries to his head, shoulder, back, and buttocks before the bear moved away. Schmidt said the man was able to get back to his house to call emergency crews, who then took him to the hospital.
He told authorities he did not want the bear killed because he thought it was just doing what bears naturally do.
Schmidt said there was no evidence the bear tried to eat the man.
"It looks like both the bear and the victim were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Schmidt said.
The man's skull was not punctured, which is common when a grizzly tries to eliminate a perceived threat, according to one expert.
"The man did the right thing by curling up into a ball to protect his vitals," said Steve Nadeau, the large carnivore manager for Idaho Department of Fish and Game. "Once the threat (to the bear) was alleviated, the bear moved on. It¹s very common in those sorts of incidents."
The moose carcass was found about 150 feet away from the man's home in thick cover, according to Fish and Game reports. The man did not know the carcass was there, Schmidt said.
Fish and Game officials, who found grizzly tracks near the home, said Wednesday they laid traps around the moose carcass and were working with the sheriff¹s officials to trap it, but the bear had not returned to the area by late Wednesday.
Cook said Tuesday's sighting was the year's first in the Tetonia area, but grizzly sightings are common during the summer months.
Nadeau said there was a grizzly attack last year in the Henry's Lake area -- about 70 miles north of Tetonia. In that case a lone hiker sustained injuries to his buttocks. Nadeau said the bear reported in that attack was not found.
Nadeau said there have been at least three or four black bear attacks during the last 20 years, but injuries to people were minor.
In general, grizzly bears in the area come out of hibernation in March.
Their major food source at this time is winter-killed game.
Nadeau estimated there are about 100 grizzly bears in Idaho -- between 20-to-30 in the Idaho portion of the Yellowstone ecosystem near Wyoming, and between 50-to-70 grizzlies in the Selkirk mountain ecosystem in North Idaho's panhandle area.
Overall, federal wildlife officials say there are more than 600 grizzlies in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem that spreads out of the national park into the three surrounding states.
The man's home is located 5.5 miles northeast of Tetonia in low foothills at the base of the Teton Range where sagebrush mixes with stands of aspen trees on the edge of a large evergreen forest.
Grizzly numbers have risen in Idaho in the last decade as sheep ranches have been bought out and hundreds of miles of forest roads closed.
At the same time hundreds of homes have been built on the edges of grizzly habitat in Teton and Fairmont counties, some of the fastest growing areas in the state.
"As we put more and more homes in grizzly country we will expect more and more encounters like this unless people are vigilant," Schmidt said.
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