Would you pay $41 to see a bear along a road? The Bear News, July 21, 2014

How much would you pay to see a bear in a national park?

That’s the question posed by a paper in the Journal of Environmental Management that our friend Skeptical Scalpel sent along. From the background of the study, which focuses on Yellowstone:

Traffic jams on the Park’s roads due to bear viewing began in the early 20th century, a time when visitors could feed panhandling bears from stagecoaches with some regularity (Schullery, 1992). Practices such as these led to an increase in the number of bear-inflicted human injuries within the Park’s boundaries, averaging 48 injuries per year from the 1930’s through the 1960’s (Gunther and Hoekstra, 1998). With the implementation of a strictly enforced bear management program in the 1970’s, this number declined dramatically, with a large portion of the decline coming from reduced black bear caused injuries on roadsides (Gunther, 1994).

Here’s the abstract (emphasis mine):

Man bites (OK, saves) bear, bears eat cupcakes and cookies: The Bear News, July 7, 2014

Ever since I took on the persona of a bear — my Twitter avatar is a cub that wandered up to our living room window a few years ago — people send me a lot of news about bears. So I figured I’d share these important tidbits periodically: