Thinking outside the den

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

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

Mona (275431) is a 7-year-old female cat. She is shy, but given a chance to warm up, she requests pets with adorable head-butts. Mona can also be lured with treats! Mona and her sister Biscuit (275430) may be adopted together for a

FoothillsAnimalShelter.org info@fas4pets.org species living in Colorado — to relocate them, avoid putting them down and reduce chances of further con ict.

“Je just doesn’t do anything halfway,” says Frank McGee, who supervised Belveal when the project began, before becoming CPW’s law enforcement training manager. “He’s very self-motivated as well, and I’ve always appreciated the way he takes pride in his work. He takes each and every part of his job seriously.”

Colorado Parks and Wildlife estimates that the state’s bear population hovers between 17,000 and 20,000. A spring freeze or drought conditions can su ciently infringe on natural food sources to nudge bears into close contact with humans — circumstances that people often exacerbate through behavior that encourages interaction and often, much to wildlife o cers’ dismay, leads to fatal consequences for the bears.

Since the implementation of a new statewide bear reporting system in 2019, CPW has logged over 18,300 sightings and con icts with bears, and nearly one-third of them involved enticements like trash cans and dumpsters. e problem has become pervasive enough that CPW recently announced it will be continuing a $1 million competitive grant program launched with state funding two years ago for local projects aimed at reducing bear con ict.

When bears persist, traps may be used to capture, tag and release them — one important strategy to avoid putting them down. Since 2015, CPW has relocated 461 bears.

But over the years, more than a dozen wildlife areas across the state have accumulated such a variety of traps that on many occasions o cers scramble to nd the right one for a particular situation. Many of them are old and crusted with rust. And