Draw a Circle to Protect From Bear

Pinnacle camping season is upon usa, and this July and August millions of Americans volition be loading the minivan, heading into our national parks and forests, and inevitably coming together some bears.

Fortunately, most of these encounters will be uneventful. In nearly every instance, the bear will turn its tail and run. Take Yellowstone national park for example, a perfect grizzly bear habitat. In its 145-twelvemonth history, with over 120 million visitors, only eight people have been killed past bears. You are far more likely to die of a tick bite or a bee sting. Indeed, you are more likely to be murdered in your own bed in America than you are to exist killed by a grizzly while camping ground in Yellowstone.

And yet our fear of America's largest predator prevails (images of Leonardo DiCaprio beingness ripped apart in Alejandro Iñárritu's The Revenant are hard to forget).

If statistics cannot assuage our primeval fear, possibly knowledge can. The fact of the affair is running into the continent's largest predator is unlikely. Just hither'south what to do if you run into a yogi in the wild.

First, know your bears

A grizzly bear mother and her cub walk near Pelican Creek in the Yellowstone national park in Wyoming. Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

If you come up into contact with a bear, it's important to know what you lot're dealing with. There are three species in North America: the blackness bear, brown bear and polar bear. Unless you're hiking higher up the Arctic Circle, you'll likely only meet i of the start ii. Weighing in at 200-500lbs, black bears can exist white, blond, cinnamon, chocolate or jet black. The good news? Many are largely vegetarian.

Dark-brown bears are divided into two categories: dark-brown bears and grizzlies. Grizzlies are smaller than brown bears, weighing 200-700lbs, where the littoral brown bear can easily weigh over 1,000lbs. Although they come in the aforementioned variety of colors equally black bears, grizzlies/brownish bears are easily distinguished from black bears by their greater size, large hump at the shoulders and massive caput. Of the estimated 32,000 bruins, just a couple grand inhabit Yellowstone and Glacier, the remainder are in Canada and Alaska.

Be alert

A brownish bear enjoys a morning bath. Photo: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA

The all-time fashion to handle a deport see is never to have one. Bears like thick brush, berry patches and parsnip thickets, but also regularly use hiking trails. The final affair y'all desire to do is startle a bear. Here are 5 ways to avoid doing so.

• Exit your damn earbuds in the car and be alert to every sound and movement.
  
• Make dissonance. Unfortunately, hiking quietly endangers you. Phone call out and handclapping your hands often. Sing loudly.
  
• Beware of bullheaded corners and loud streams where a bear may non see or hear y'all.
  
• Hike in groups of at to the lowest degree three people.
  
• Comport bear spray! Repeat. Comport bear spray!

If you practice everything right and you still meet one ...

• Practise non endeavor to get closer to take a picture!
  
• Practice non run. You're acting only like casualty.
• Slowly pull out your deport spray and remove the safety lock.
• If information technology is a black bear, gather together, stand tall and make lots of noise.
• If it's a grizzly, remain notwithstanding and calm. Properly position the bear spray in your hand.
• Speak in an appeasing vox and very slowly back away.
• An agitated grizzly may pop its jaws and pound the basis with its paws. It may besides lunge toward you in a bluff charge. Do not use your pepper spray unless the bear is within twenty-five feet.
• If the deport charges, aim the nozzle of the spray simply above the carry'south head and give a sustained nail.

Remember you tin protect yourself with a gun? Forget it

An Alaskan brown deport continuing and growling: don't run. Photograph: Galen Rowell/Stock Connectedness/Alamy

In this fierce lodge where there are over 300m guns – one for every man, adult female and child – the well-nigh common myth is that you can protect yourself from a carry with a gun. Forget it.

According to research by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, of those who defended themselves against a behave set on with a weapon, 50% sustained serious injuries – compared to very few injuries incurred by those defending themselves with bear spray. In 2 studies published in 2008 and 2012 by bear researchers Tom Smith, a professor at BYU, and Stephen Herrero, professor emeritus at the Academy of Calgary and author of Behave Attacks: Their Causes and Abstention, the profound efficacy of conduct spray versus weapons has been proven beyond a doubt.

Carry deport spray

"Naught has inverse over the past 20 years," Herrero told me by phone from his home in Calgary. "Behave spray is the most constructive deterrent in bear encounters." Herrero, 76, explains that when a 500lb animal is charging you lot at 30 mph, a bullet is very pocket-size and can easily miss or injure rather than stop a behave. On the other paw, behave spray has a 20ft spread at a 25ft range. (Practice using bear spray before going into bear land.)

"Bear spray is not a substitute for common sense and existence cautious – looking around, making dissonance, fugitive dense bushes and berry patches – but it needs to exist with y'all, always on your belt not inside your pack, whenever you're hiking in carry country."

At present become out at that place and go camping ground.

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/21/what-to-do-bear-encounter-attack