Thinking outside the den

Wildlife o cials turn to guy who never caught a bear to make a better bear trap

BY KEVIN SIMPSON THE COLORADO SUN

On the caretaker’s property adjacent to the local state wildlife area, sheets of structural steel, once blanketed by snow but now tickled by tumbleweeds, sit stacked on the ground awaiting their eventual transformation.

Inside a nearby outbuilding sits the nished product the raw materials soon will replicate, once it’s their turn to be cut, welded and shaped into a contraption state o cials have been craving for years: a better, lighter, more versatile bear trap.

Je Belveal, the 36-year-old Colorado Parks and Wildlife resource technician who took on the project, notes that his little slice of paradise on the plains may be home to a seemingly inordinate number of white-tailed deer, but there’s not a bear in sight. And metalworking, while among the skills he honed in pursuit of an agency gig, gures only tangentially into a job description that includes maintenance and upkeep of ve state wildlife areas — everything from cleaning the toilets to xing fence lines, maintaining roads, managing grazing and weed mitigation.

“ is is extra credit,” Belveal says of the bear trap project. “All I brought to the table here was a willingness to tackle the problem.”

Colleagues will tell you it’s much more than that, and talk at length about how Belveal’s retiring and self-e acing personality short-sells a skilled and dedicated worker. In fact, a lifetime of persistence and a penchant for problem-solving put him at the center of a collaborative e ort to reimagine a trap for safely and e ectively capturing problematic black bears — the only bear spe-

SEE BEAR TRAP, P25

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