Longtime grizzly bear manager retires from FWP

By CHRIS PETERSON

Hungry Horse News

Longtime Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear manager Tim Manley will retire at the end of the year.

Manley was a pioneer in bear management noted FWP Region 1 supervisor Jim Williams, during the Northern Continental Divide Grizzly Bear Ecosystem Subcommittee meeting earlier this month.

Manley spent 37 years in the field of wildlife management, mostly taking care of and moving problem grizzly bears in and around the Flathead Valley.

“He had an outstanding and impactful career,” Williams said.

He noted Manley’s body of research work also included woodland caribou, bighorn sheep and sharp-tailed grouse.

On the pioneering front, Manley started monitoring snowpack and green up more than 30 years ago, and created some of the first remote camera systems to use motion and heat to trigger the shutter.

He also helped create the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear augmentation program, where bears from this area are moved to the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, Williams noted.

But he noted it was Manley’s people skills — working with the public and the bears — that were paramount to his career with FWP.

“You’re relationship buildings skills (were) bar none,” Williams said.

From Manley’s standpoint, he was all business at the meeting, as he gave his last report to the subcommittee.

He gave a long talk on this history of Monica, a grizzly bear up the North Fork that, over time, became accustomed to eating garbage and breaking into campers.

In a video Manley took, Monica and her cubs are seen tearing open an RV like a tin can to get at food inside.

Manley had to capture and put Monica and her three cubs down, they were simply too dangerous to humans.

On the success side, he gave another presentation on the fencing efforts done after nine different grizzly bears started breaking into a compost facility north of Columbia Falls.

The facility already had a large fence around it and an electric fence, but the bears took to digging under it to avoid being shocked. That’s how strong the will to get at the compost was.

Manley said they dug down and put electric fencing where the bears were digging.

He said they also moved four of the bears while they did the work.

One female made a big loop through the valley, from Glacier Park to Dickey Lake to west of Kalispell before eventually circling around and denning in the Whitefish Range.

Manley thanked Two Bear Air for volunteering their helicopter time in tracking bears and his wife, Rachel for her support.
Manley’s efforts over the years have also been in the national spotlight. He was featured in a piece earlier this summer that aired on 60 Minutes, the CBS News program.