Trio of bears rescued from golf course

“Essentially, basically, when you scare bear it, it goes up a tree. You’re not going to scare them out of the tree. Generally, they’ll only going to come out if they want to come out,” says McArthur.

But it almost went unnoticed on the course, as it was business as usual with a few modifications.

“Well, it’s affected the play in the sense that working with the conservation officers, they, of course, wanted the bear left to their own,” explains Don McDermid, Manager of the club. “So we’ve rerouted the holes and we made some changes. Predominantly, the bear stayed in one location, so it wasn’t too problematic for us.”

A golf course is not out of the realm of possibility for refuge, though not common.

“It’s not usually in Prince George, but I mean, it’s a very big green space. There’s there’s lots of trees. There are some food sources. The grass is well-tailored. And they’ll graze on the grass till the till the cows come home. So and I mean some it depends on what’s going on. If they’re if they’re using it as an interim place and they’re just going to move on.”

The bears have been around noisy golf carts and equally noisy golfers all week but McArthur says these three have not likely been habituated to humans, regardless.

“I mean, there’s always that possibility with urban bears. But as far as these bears go, we didn’t have any history of unnatural food supply, so that habituation was to natural foods like these crabapple trees.”

The three will be taken from the course to a bear sanctuary in Smithers, safe and sound.

by Cheryl Jahn

Trio of bears rescued from golf course

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