WHITEFISH, Mont. -- The 2-year-old bear may not realize it, but it only has one more chance.
Twice already it has been caught: the first time rummaging through garbage in a back yard, the second a week later after an anxious resident reported the 400-pound male junior grizzly devouring apples close to a house on the outskirts of town.
In the harsh world of bear management around here these days, if it gets caught again, it's finished.
"Each case is different, but we tend to stick to a 'three strikes and you're out' policy," said Tim Manley, a bear-management specialist for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. He had just driven the bear two hours deep into grizzly territory and let the animal out of its trap. Growling, the bear glanced over its hulking shoulders at Manley and bounded up a hill. "After that it's almost impossible to teach the bear to stay away and we have to destroy it," Manley said.
This year, 28 grizzlies have been killed by humans in this region, with 13 of the killings officially sanctioned by authorities for bears that had used up their three chances.
"These are unprecedented figures," said Brian Peck of the Great Bear Foundation, a conservation group, pointing out that until this year the highest number of human-caused bear deaths was 20, in 2000.
At least 14 of the bears killed have been female. Federal guidelines allow for only four female deaths per year to sustain the bear population, and this year's killings have left scientists concerned that should the rate continue, the number of bears will decline.
Just 10 years ago people living in northwestern Montana rarely encountered grizzlies roaming outside their isolated redoubts high above the little towns in the valley floors. But things have changed, leading to tensions between those who want the bears, which grow to 600 pounds and 8 feet tall, to remain protected and those who consider them dangerous predators hampering development.
After nearly 30 years of protection under the Endangered Species Act, the grizzly bear population in the lower 48 states has burgeoned to between 1,000 and 1,300. About 500 are concentrated here in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, a sprawling 9,500-square-mile range straddling the Canadian border with Glacier National Park at its heart.
The local human population has grown by about 30 percent in the past 10 years, swollen by an increasing number of retirees, part-time residents and visitors lured by the rugged landscape and proximity to some of the last remaining wilderness in the United States.
As human development encroaches into what was already a shrinking habitat for the resurgent bear population, confrontation is inevitable, said Chris Servheen, a grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
"In some ways I guess you could say that we're victims of our own success in recovering the bear population," Servheen said. "Because we have more bears today, we have more human-bear conflicts. The question now is how to ensure those conflicts are kept to the minimum."
Compounding the problem this year is a scarcity of food in the higher elevations. A late-spring frost ruined much of the berry crop, and other traditional staples of the grizzly diet, such as white-bark pine nuts, are in decline. For voracious eaters such as bears this spells disaster, increasing their need to venture closer to human territory in search of alternatives.
This is where Manley comes in. Employing what bear biologists call "aversive conditioning" tactics -- yelling, firing shotgun blanks, beanbags and rubber bullets or charging bears with specially trained Finnish dogs -- the wildlife conflict specialist teaches grizzlies to avoid human contact.
