Someone recently wrote me a note about the type of bears here. Until yesterday, I wasn't sure what kind of bears we have, and was picturing a smallish type bear easily forgiven for raiding a kitchen in search of sugar. However, these are Ursus arctos! Ursus arctos are known as Brown Bears, Alaskan Brown Bears, Grizzly Bears, Kodiak Bears, etc. depending on where they live. Some people used to call these Pika-Eating bears, because that's about 70% of their diet. I've found a bunch of different products online and through the park service that are grizzly -proof. Now I've got to figure out how to build them here cheaply enough that people can afford them, and large enough that they can store their things in them. I just found out that the bear raids do damage equivalent to more than a year's salary- so the containers have to be large enough to hold many of the families' belongings while they are away from their winter homes. Also, the winter homes that people live in are one-time, gov't provided housing that the families could never afford to build on their own. So when a bear raid destroys the roof, walls, doors, windows, and furniture- it is a long-term devastation.
The dedication of farmers/ranchers/herders everywhere....
On another note, I'm also trying to figure out how high a corral wall needs to be so that it's wolf proof (Canis lupus). We're probably going to put a strand of high tensile electric around the top, powered by solar cells. When you're raising sheep, goats, and yak in the middle of the world's second largest nature reserve full of grizzlies, wolves, and snow leopards and facing winter temperatures of 30 below and sparse grazing land- you've got to be pretty stinking dedicated! Like the old joke goes... There was a farmer in Virginia who won the jack-pot lotto- over 10 million dollars! A reporter from ABC channel 13 asked him what he was going to do now that he had all that money. The farmer thought awhile, looked out over his hay field, then turned back to the reporter and said "Well, I reckon I'll just keep farming till it's all gone".
