Former state grizzly bear manager Wesley Sarmento vividly recalls a routine call along the Rocky Mountain Front in 2019. It was early in the morning, and a bear was in a family’s front yard.
"This family had chickens and they had children and so I ran out there as quick as I could,” Sarmento says.
Normally Sarmento would have used his pickup to scare the bear off, but thick mud after a heavy rain meant that wasn’t an option. He started firing non-lethal shotgun shells, but the bear charged. Sarmento fell backward into the mud.
“And luckily, I was able to shoot a cracker shell right in front of it. And it blew up right in front of the bear and turned it and sent it running towards the river."
Sarmento describes that close call as an epiphany.
"I was like, ‘I need to do something different or I'm going to get myself injured or killed.”
Sarmento turned to highly trained dogs – specifically, Airedales – but they weren’t always successful in scaring bears off. He eventually tried a drone.
“It was super effective.”
The drone’s camera gave him a much better sense of where problem bears were hanging out.
"As soon as they detected the drone, whether it was 50 yards out or 20 yards out, they would start fleeing in the other direction. And these drones were very maneuverable, and so I could really thread the needle and push the bear exactly where I needed the bear to go."
Nobody knows exactly why bears react as strongly as they do to drones. Some wonder if the devices remind bears of the sound bees make; presenting all the risk of getting stung while raiding hives, with none of the sweet honey reward.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Bear Management Specialist Dave Kemp agrees that drones are a powerful management tool.
“Somebody would have to pry it out of my hands. I’m not giving it up," Kemp says.
Kemp now works out of the same Conrad office Sarmento once did. He recalls one late-night call about a bear outside a Dupuyer home. It was already pitch black.
“I don't want to have to explain to one of my technicians' parents why I got them injured on a bear call by traipsing around in the bushes with a flashlight,” he says.
The team used the drone’s thermal camera to easily find the bear. Then they scared it off.
Sarmento is now a PhD student at the University of Montana. His research indicates most of the bears he hazed with drones learned to stay away from people.
Not everyone in the bear world is as enthusiastic about drones. Nils Pederson is the director of the Wind River Bear Institute, based out of Fairbanks, Alaska. The nonprofit also has a chapter in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.
Pederson trains Karelian Bear Dogs to solve conflicts between humans and bears. He says the bear dogs are, “bred to leave you, range out and find game, bay it up and bark at it so you as a hunter could track down your dog, track down your game. We're taking that instinct that these dogs have and applying it for conservation purposes.”
The bear dogs help managers find the bears and scare them off. That helps prevent the animals from being euthanized.
At University of Alaska Fairbanks, he evaluated the efficacy of drones for polar bear and grizzly bear den detection in Alaska’s North Slope oil fields.
Pederson says drones can be effective hazing tools in the open landscapes like the kind found in north-central Montana, but adds they’re not nearly as effective over thick cover.
"I can tell you, if you were gonna be trying to haze bears in places like the jungles of Southeast Alaska, the drone would have a real tough time navigating through that, because it's just such thick vegetation cover.”
It’s not just the dense rainforest of southeast Alaska. Montana is also home to vegetation-heavy terrain. He says there will always be a place for bear dogs in that kind of terrain.
It is illegal for the general public to use drones to push bears off their property. In untrained hands, drones could kill a bear under certain circumstances, including hot weather.
Back at the University of Montana in Missoula, Wesley Sarmento is thinking about the future of drones in bear management.
Sarmento says they could one day be engineered to remotely deliver a bear spray deterrent for particularly stubborn predators.
He even envisions implementation of artificial intelligence capable of identifying dangerous wildlife in populated areas. They could then autonomously chase them off using preset routes into safe locations.
“This is just where it starts," Sarmento says.
He says the hard work and creativity put into this technology isn’t ending any time soon.
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