Glacier’s famous webcam bear: Cute … or killer?

KALISPELL – America’s favorite tree bear may have been a llama killer.

The black bear that garnered 750,000 Facebook followers when Glacier National Park staff put its treetop den on a webcam this spring is a suspect in a livestock killing shortly after the webcam went offline. While the evidence isn’t conclusive, the bear had motive and opportunity.

“It’s circumstantial,” Glacier wildlife biologist John Waller said during a regional grizzly bear meeting Wednesday. “That was the bear we caught in the trap. But there are a lot of black bears in that area.”

The famous black bear was hibernating in the cavity of a huge cottonwood tree just outside the park border. For nearly two weeks, hundreds of thousands of people watched it groom itself, yawn, and occasionally break off branches to munch without ever coming down from its perch.

“My retired father is pushing 80, and I’d get a text: ‘The bear is climbing up the tree,’ ” Waller said. “It got to be where I’d look out my office window and see people sneaking through the woods, going where the webcam was to view the bear. It was getting out of control, so we took the camera down.”

The bear came down from the tree shortly after. Then the caretaker of a pair of llamas near the tree came to feed them and discovered them both dead.

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks wardens suspected a bear was responsible and set traps. They soon caught the prime suspect. Without any DNA or tag evidence, they couldn’t be sure it was the tree bear. Standard procedure is to kill black bears that prey on livestock.

“But how do you remove a bear with 750,000 Facebook followers?” Waller asked. “It’s sleepy and really cute, but it is a predator and predators eat meat. That’s sometimes hard for people to accept.

“That bear was relocated, and hopefully it will stay out of trouble.”

Flathead National Forest Supervisor Chip Weber called the internet situation a kind of “Bambi biology.”

“People wind up with unrealistic expectations about the behavior of bears,” Weber said. “In the long term, we could be doing a disservice for conservation of the species itself.”

The same day the alleged llama killer was getting hauled up into central Glacier Park in a culvert trap, another team of FWP biologists was delivering a grizzly bear that had been captured near Helmville on the southern edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. It also was released in Glacier, although it never got a Facebook page.

“We use the idea attractive megafauna as a way to raise money to help with conservation of bears,” Weber said. “As ecologists, we know there’s as much importance in a snail as a bear, but you can raise a lot more money with a bear. You end up with the Hollywood version of ecology and wildlife, compared to what we know as scientists.”