People type save the bears in a year like this one and mostly mean something narrower: how do I keep a hungry bear from dying in my alley. Half of that answer is in your hands this week. The other half is not in the alley at all.
Colorado's towns have spent thirty years learning the first half well: latched cans, daily patrols, a state law with real fines. That work is necessary and it is working. It is also, by design, a way to manage where a hungry bear eats. It cannot decide whether the bear is hungry.
Short answer: Securing trash, birdseed, pet food, grills, cars, and fruit trees keeps bears out of town and alive this season. It does not replace the berry and acorn crop a drought erased. Saving bears means doing the alley work now and funding the wild food supply — the food year — so the dry years ahead have less to raid. The alley pays off this weekend; forage pays off on a shrub's clock.
save the bears this week: the alley checklist
This is the part you can finish before the weekend, condensed from BearWise and the Colorado Parks and Wildlife guidance towns hand out each August.
| attractant | what to do | why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| trash, compost, recycling | Wildlife-resistant container, latched, out only the morning of pickup | Trash is the leading attractant statewide; recycling and compost smell like food too, which is why Aspen's and Durango's codes both name them |
| birdseed | Take feeders down until Thanksgiving | One feeder holds thousands of calories, and a bear in hyperphagia — the fall feeding push before denning — is looking for roughly 20,000 a day |
| pet food and livestock feed | Indoors or in a locked outbuilding | Bowls on the porch are a daily appointment |
| grills and smokers | Burn off, scrape, store covered and clean | Grease is the smell that carries |
| cars, garages, ground-floor windows | Lock them; nothing edible in the vehicle | A bear that has opened one car door has learned car doors |
| fruit trees | Pick early, glean drops, or replace with non-fruiting stock | Aspen used a CPW grant to swap fruit-bearing trees inside city limits for exactly this reason |
If you rent, host, or manage a property, add one line: tell the next occupant where the latch is. Most failures are not defiance. They are a Tuesday-night arrival who has never seen a bear can.
what towns are already doing
Two Colorado towns show the ceiling of alley work done well.
Aspen moved its wildlife program from the police department into Parks and Open Space in 2024, hired a full-time coordinator, and shifted the program toward education, outreach, and a bear hotline residents actually call. First-year results: container compliance up 69%, trash intrusions down 25%. Then the food year failed. Through August 19, 2026 the city logged 388 trash intrusions, against 167 for the same period in 2025 and 91 in 2024. Staff now check alleys seven days a week instead of five or six, have written 19 citations, tagged hundreds of containers with warnings, and loan out bear-resistant cans and electric mats. Short-term rentals must register with the city and carry the fine for whatever their guests leave out.
Durango went the infrastructure route. Ordinance O-2018-6 followed a 2011–2015 study with Colorado Parks and Wildlife that found wildlife-resistant containers cut human-bear conflict by about half. The city delivers a bear-resistant can for a $100 delivery fee plus $4.35 a month over four and a half years, automatic after a first scattered-trash violation, and Bear Smart Durango offers county residents a $100 rebate for buying their own.
Both programs are cousins of anything this series proposes. Both are also the best evidence for the limit. Aspen's coordinator told a bear-conflict workshop in 2025 that once residents secured their poly-carts, bears started breaking into metal dumpsters — the next weakness only shows up after the last one is fixed. That is not a failure of the ordinance. It is what an ordinance looks like when the hills are empty.
the law, in one paragraph
House Bill 26-1342 took effect August 12, 2026. It changes the standard in Colorado's luring statute from intentionally placing food where a bear can get it to knowingly doing so where there is a reasonable probability a bear will find it. Officers no longer have to issue a warning on a first offense, and the maximum fine for a third or later offense rose from $2,000 to $5,000. The bill's own findings put the agency cost of bear conflict in 2024 at roughly 6,000 staff hours and about $800,000. It is a good law. It prices the alley. It does not price the acorn crop.
why nobody is going to feed them
Colorado Parks and Wildlife fielded a rising number of questions this summer that came down to: if the bears are starving, why not drop food in the backcountry? The agency's answer is correct and worth repeating plainly.
Colorado's wildlife commission will consider emergency feeding for big game like deer and elk in a severe winter — an agency operation, not a green light for residents. Those are herd animals that can share a hay line with little conflict. Black bears are solitary and territorial with large home ranges. Concentrate hungry bears around a pile of food and you get overcrowding, deadly fights between adults, cubs at risk, and a disease vector. Bears also learn who brings the food, and a bear that associates people with an easy meal is the bear most likely to hurt someone — and the one an officer eventually has to kill. Feeding at high elevation would not stop the seasonal move downhill that happens even in good years; feeding at low elevation would put the food exactly where the conflict already is. And 20,000 calories a day, per bear, across a population estimated at 17,000 to 20,000, is not a logistics problem anyone solves with a truck.
So the agency holds the line it adopted by commission policy in 2013: no human food, in any year, anywhere. The preliminary count through August 31 — more than 8,600 reports, 98 relocations, 294 bears killed — is not a score against that policy. It is the receipt for a food year that failed before the policy had anything to work with.
the berry crop
A food year is the wild calorie budget a bear population lives on between den and den: spring grasses, summer serviceberry and chokecherry, hawthorn, and in fall the Gambel oak acorn crop and piñon that carry a bear into hyperphagia. In 2026 a thin snowpack, drought, wildfire, and a late frost knocked most of those out across the Western Slope at once. The bears did not change. The pantry did.
A trash ordinance manages where a hungry bear eats. A food year decides whether it is hungry.
Set the two side by side and the gap is the whole argument.
| trash ordinance | berry crop | |
|---|---|---|
| what it fixes | access to human food in town | the calorie supply in the hills |
| when it acts | after the bear has arrived | before the bear has a reason to come |
| who pays today | residents, haulers, city staff, tickets | federal and state land agencies, at habitat-program scale — almost never the town buying the cans |
| what it looks like when it fails | a bear in a dumpster | a bear in a dumpster |
| what it cannot do | grow a chokecherry | keep a latch shut |
The last row is the point. Both failures show up in the same alley, so towns keep buying more of the thing that treats the alley. A town budget can see a can. The Gambel oak stand that dropped nothing this year, and the riparian strip that dried before the berries set, sit above the city limits on Forest Service, BLM, or private ground. Federal and state habitat programs reach them; no municipal code does, and no town department is funded to.
the leak
If alley hygiene has a ceiling, the ceiling in a mountain town is turnover.
A restaurant smokes meat overnight and the smell drifts three blocks; its coolers, compost, and dumpsters share a narrow alley with four other kitchens and one compactor nobody is quite responsible for. A short-term rental changes hands every three nights and every new guest meets the bear can for the first time. A second home sits empty from Labor Day to Christmas with a plum tree dropping fruit onto the lawn. None of these people are villains. Each is a node in a system that resets to zero on a schedule, and a bear's memory does not reset.
This is why Aspen wrote short-term rental liability into its code, and why hospitality is the sector that can move the number fastest. A hotel or restaurant group that standardizes its back-of-house — metal dumpsters with latching lids, grease management, a laminated card at every check-in — closes more of the leak than any single homeowner can. It is still alley work. It is the alley work that matters most.
keep the ordinance. fund the crop.
The people already paying for a failed food year are the town, the county, the wildlife agency, the hospitality operators, and the households buying cans and eating fines. Every one of those payments arrives after the bear does. Funding the food year means paying, in the present tense, for what keeps a bear in the hills: restoring the shrubs and oaks that produce mast — the wild nut and berry crop — on the summer-to-fall range, holding riparian water so berries still set through a dry August, fruit-tree replacement at the town edge, and the monitoring that says whether the crop actually came in.
Ensurance is how that gets funded as an asset rather than a donation. A named habitat — a drainage, a range, a stewarded parcel — is priced by its condition, and the money routed to it is reported against that condition. The price follows the condition; it is not a performance bond on next year's berries. Coins fund protection across the protocol; certificates fund one named place. The bear is not the asset and the fine is not its worth; the forage is the asset, and the bear is why you care. Today the live doors are small — habitat.ensurance and a handful of place accounts, at early volumes. There is no bear token, and we would tell you if there were.
For a town or county: the cans, the coordinator, and the code stay. What changes is one funded place on the range above you, — planted, watered, and monitored on the timeline mast actually takes, so the dry years after this one have something to hold the bears where they belong. See how governments use ensurance →
For a hotel, restaurant group, or property manager: fix the back-of-house this month, then put the same rigor into the hills your guests came to see. Hospitality and services →
For the reader who typed save the bears: the alley is yours this week. The crop is the next post. fund the food year →
the series
This is part of the food year — drought empties the wild pantry; the alley is the receipt.