Waking up to the bears waking up

Living in such a seasonal place like the Northern Rockies, we learn to attune to the changing landscape — skiing and knitting in the winter, rafting and hiking in the summer. We’re a lot like our wild neighbors that way. The animals who make their homes in these mountains and river valleys have found ways over the millennia to adapt to the seasons, be it with migration, thick winter coats or hibernation. 

Bears have one of the more well-known and remarkable seasonal shifts. During the cold months, grizzlies retreat to high elevation dens. Their heart rates drop to 8-19 beats per minute and they use their caloric stores from the summer and fall to maintain anywhere from 70-85 percent of their body weight without major losses to muscle or bone health. 

When the weather warms again in the spring, their physiological feat is over and they emerge to forage for early season shoots, roots and bugs. In the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem bear "wake up" or den exit typically happens around March 15, though changing weather patterns could shift it sooner in future years. It can happen a week or two earlier in Greater Yellowstone, with national park officials already documenting the first fresh grizzly tracks of 2025. 

For us, spring is when we must wake up to the realities of sharing our landscapes with bears. Like all living things, bears are fundamentally motivated to survive and reproduce. Many of the conflicts we have with them therefore stem from bears trying to defend themselves or access food. Staying safe around bears requires that we remove or secure anything on our properties that could attract a hungry bear and provide fertile ground for possible conflicts.  

Food-conditioned or habituated bears who are recurrently rewarded with human food sources can lose their fear of people and start behaving in unpredictable ways. They may respond aggressively with someone they encounter as they move about the landscape searching for food, and are sometimes relocated or euthanized by wildlife managers out of a concern for public safety. This means that securing attractants isn’t just about keeping yourself and your loved ones safe, it also protects our broader community and the bears themselves.  

As opportunistic omnivores, bears are attracted to many things that might not initially strike us as obvious food sources, like chickens, bird feeders, compost, barbecues, pet food and more. Bears have abundant natural food sources but when smelly and easily accessible foods are available on our properties they can be tempted to come back again and again. Ensuring they don’t get a food reward the first time, through preemptively rather than reactively securing attractants, helps keep bears in the wilderness where they belong and moving quickly on if they do end up in our backyards. 

A variety of community groups, like Swan Valley Connections serving the Bigfork area, are available to help ease the burden of making your property as bear-resistant as possible with things like  bear-resistant garbage cans and electric fencing. Staying safe and coexisting with powerful animals like bears is something people have been learning how to do on this landscape for many, many seasons. We have a wide array of both time tested and innovative tools, such as livestock guardian dogs, bear spray and range riding, to help us. By educating ourselves, finding the most effective way to deal with whatever attractants exist in our neighborhoods, and sharing that expertise with others, we invest in the well-being of our community now and in future seasons.  

Like anything else we do on an annual cycle — spring cleaning, daylight saving or changing the smoke detector battery — bear den exit is a good calendar marker to remind us to freshen up on bear aware practices and secure attractants on our properties. Vital Ground and other groups have guidance and checklists to walk you through the most essential steps, whether you’re a recreationist, landowner, visitor or community leader. 

Up in the mountains the bears are waking up, emerging from their dens of brush and snow. As seasonal creatures too, we have to make sure we’re awake and aware about bear safe practices this time of year. If we want our descendants to get to experience the wondrous seasonality, including the seasonal habits of wildlife like bears, that makes our shared landscapes so special we will have to be responsive to those cycles as caring stewards.  

Swan Valley Connections is a conservation and education nonprofit that serves the Swan Watershed.