YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — You can see a lot of animals in Yellowstone in the wintertime—bison, elk, wolves, and a lot more—but one thing you're not likely to see in the winter in Yellowstone is bears.
“Most of them are in bed. They're not on the landscape moving around,” said Danielle Oyler with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP).
But that doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't be carrying your bear spray at this time of year.
“It was designed for bears, but it works on other large mammals as well,” said Oyler.
And some of those animals can be dangerous during winter months.
“If I'm skiing with my dog, I will bring my bear spray because dogs can agitate moose and then I may need to use the bear spray for moose,” Oyler said.
So the current advice is just to carry your bear spray year-round, and consider a travel and storage case for times when you leave it in your vehicle.
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Last summer, video of a mother bear with five cubs excited people on social media. The cubs have not been seen for months, and bear biologists say it’s unlikely the big family is all together in a den this winter.
“Cub survival is about 49 percent, so there's a good chance that she's going to lose at least two, maybe three of those five cubs,” said Yellowstone Bear Biologist Kerry Gunther.
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In Yellowstone, there are a growing number of reports of people seeing bears very late in the fall, early in the spring, even during the middle of winter during the heavy snow season. But Danielle tells me that doesn't necessarily mean that this is happening because of climate change. Scientific studies don't show that. Instead, it could be that you have an exceptionally warm year or maybe there's a lot of food available in a given year, and bears will stay out so long as they can get food.
Or it could just be that there are more people in the park than ever before and more people out where they can see bears.
Park visitor Mike Hernandez says he drove 18 hours from California to Yellowstone just on the hope of seeing a bear in the winter—and he got his wish.
“She’s eating snow, sleeping most of the day. Been waiting a few years for this,” said Mike.
That’s right—a black bear was seen this week near the turnoff to the petrified trees. Mike says it was worth the wait.
