As bear season nears an end, and the animals’ food supplies continue to dwindle, city officials are exploring how to handle the hundreds of thousands of crabapples in trees lining Aspen’s streets.
The Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife (CPW) advises governments and private homeowners alike to harvest fruit from trees, to help keep bears out of them and away from humans.
“To reduce conflicts, you need to remove attractants,” said CPW’s area wildlife manager Perry Will. “That means crabapples, trash, birdfeeders.”
CPW hasn’t forced the issue with local leaders, though Will said it would be ideal not to have bear food lining sidewalks, parks and pedestrian malls here.
“Would we prefer to have attractants removed? Yes, we would,” said Will. “But they’d probably prefer we keep the bears out of town, too.”
As bears made their way into town often this summer to search for food, the people who oversee the city’s trees started looking into ways to clean out the crabapples.
“We are very supportive of a private property owner clearing their trees,” said city parks and open space director Stephen Ellsperman. “And we’re trying to figure out ways that we can do that on our public trees as well.”
He said the city is aware that the crabapple trees attract bears, but keeping them all fruit-free would be a larger undertaking than one might think. Ellsperman said that mobilizing city staff to pick fruit from all the downtown trees would likely require an undue amount of manpower.
“It’s not as easy as it might sound to pick a bunch of crabapple trees,” he said.
He said the city parks crew has this fall begun a collaboration with the Aspen Police Department, which deals directly with bear conflicts and enforces the city’s bear-centric trash ordinance, and may clear trees in some hot spots in coming days. In the long term, he said, the city is exploring ways to prune trees and keep them from attracting bears. It may enlist volunteers to help with the project in future years, he said.
The city long ago banned planting new fruit-bearing trees on private property, and stopped planting them on public land, due to bear conflicts.
“That’s a proactive step we’ve taken to try and break the cycle,” Ellsperman said.
But the public will is not likely supportive of cutting down the crabapple trees lining downtown’s pedestrian malls and sidewalks, parks and public buildings, many of them 30 to 40 years old.
“We’ve got these iconic groupings of crabapple trees that were part of the development of public spaces,” Ellsperman said. “I think everyone agrees they’re beautiful and they’re synonymous with the downtown core. We’re not able to cut those down.”
In the mid-2000s, the parks department looked into using a fruit-eliminating spray that would stop the trees from bearing fruit. But, he said, there wasn’t public support for the idea.
The cities of Basalt, Carbondale and Glenwood Springs likewise have fruit trees in public spaces that they don’t pick during the bear season.
Will said he expects bears to begin hibernating by the end of this month. Until then, though, he expects them to be coming into Aspen and anywhere else food might be available.
“The main thing is that they have nothing to eat, so they’ll be coming down,” Will said. “Wherever there’s something out to eat, they’ll go after it.”