Game and Fish relocates bear from farm fields north of town

Posted 5/18/23

Phil Quick was pleased a mature boar black bear made a soft landing in an irrigation ditch after toppling from a tree near Lane 6 with two darts in his body on May 11.

The Game and Fish Cody …

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Game and Fish relocates bear from farm fields north of town

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Phil Quick was pleased a mature boar black bear made a soft landing in an irrigation ditch after toppling from a tree near Lane 6 with two darts in his body on May 11.

The Game and Fish Cody Region large carnivore biologist was less enthused about what that meant for him — going in after the bear.

“It’s one of the top things when you go to immobilization school, which I went to a long time ago, about when you dart something, make sure what it’s going to go into, especially water,” he said. “You’ve got to be ready to get him out because they will drown obviously.”

The bear didn’t drown, as Quick and two colleagues helped the now very drowsy bruin onto the bank and then into a cage on their truck. He said the bear would be relocated to either the Absaroka or Bighorn Mountains as there were no known conflicts.

While the bear hadn’t done damage, it had been spotted by a number of farmers spread over several miles, Quick said, before Game and Fish staff were able to tree the bear near Road 10. The standoff, as the bear stubbornly resisted two darts and rubber bullets before eventually toppling from the tall tree, drew quite a crowd of area farmers and residents as Game and Fish staff determined to wait out the drugged bear.

Quick said its was a more challenging shot with a dart gun than usual — which is shooting into a live trap. Both darts hit the target, although he said the effects of the first dart may have been metabolized from all the running the bear had done. The second shot was perfect, eventually immobilizing the 4-year-old bruin.

Quick said while it’s not common, it’s not rare to see black bears range from the Shoshone River to Polecat Bench and back.

“It had started a couple of miles down and actually had gone through a few different farms and was headed back to the north, but he kept kind of going through the residential areas,” Quick said. “We decided to try and catch it and see if we could give it right back to the mountains.”

First, he said, they assessed the bear’s health and body condition to ensure it was ready to return to the wild.

It was a lucky day for the bear, as one local farmer who stopped to look considered whether he had time to run to town and get a black bear license.

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