WildsafeBC continues to visit various neighborhoods in the Cariboo to do their annual Bin Tagging.
Garbage bins placed on the curb the night before pickup are given a bright yellow sticker letting residents know their garbage is an attractant to bears.
Cariboo Coordinator for Wildsafe BC, Ted Traer explains the importance of not putting your bins out at night, especially during this time of the year.
“Right now bears are in a phase called hyperphagia , so it’s the feeding frenzy basically before hibernation. They are awake approximately 20 hours a day in attempts to access food and they’ll be forging on up to 25-thousand calories per day.”
Traer added bin tagging is one initiative Wildsafe BC hopes to prevent human-wildlife conflict in the Cariboo Regional District.
“The theory is you go out once to a neighborhood and you put the stickers on and record the bins and the addresses, it’s just a sticker, it’s an information piece it’s not a ticket by any stretch of the imagination. Some communities do that kind of enforcement, this is not that.”
Traer said “I had a lot of different opportunities this summer to communicate and reach out to people. I had just been talking to quite a few schools in the area, I was in 100 Mile House last week, and then Quesnel this week. I’ve done door-to-door campaigns and going to farmers markets to try and educate residents about attractant management.”