Was webcam bear responsible for killing 2 llamas? Maybe

A black bear that killed and started to eat two llamas in West Glacier may have been the same bear that was an Internet sensation last month.

West Glacier resident Nancy Lundgren said she was away over the weekend and discovered her two llamas dead on Monday. She called Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks and wildlife specialist Erik Wenum set a trap for the bruin.

The bear, a cinnamon-colored adult male black bear, was captured Wednesday morning. FWP spokesman Dillon Tabish said that it would be just speculation if the bear was the same bear as the one Glacier National Park trained a webcam on for a couple of weeks in late March and early April, without doing DNA testing.

“It could be,” he said. “But there’s a lot of bears in West Glacier.”

The webcam bear was an adult male that was also cinnamon colored. It was one of the most popular sites in the Park Service for a time. The Park took the camera down after people started figuring out where the bear was denning.

“The webcam was very popular online but has become increasingly popular in-person as well. It’s time we give the bear some space and allow him to move about without any additional pressure from people,” the Park posted on its website after it took the webcam down on April 13.

Tabish said FWP, from its standpoint, had no plans to do DNA testing on the bear or to try to get bear hair from the den tree. Glacier National Park spokeswoman Lauren Alley said the Park isn’t releasing the location of the bear den, which was in a hole in a cottonwood tree, but in the past, the Hungry Horse News has photographed a black bear in a cottonwood tree with a hole in it not far from Lundgren’s home along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River.

It would not be difficult for the Park to train a webcam on the same tree from park headquarters.

Lundgren said the Park did notify a family member that a bear was in the area, but the family member didn’t tell her.

“It was kind of sad that I was the last to know,” she said.

The llamas were about 10 years old, Lundgren said. They were pastured down near the river. If she had known a bear was denning close by, she would have moved them up closer to the house or at the barn, she said.

FWP has no plans to kill the bear, Tabish said. The bear hasn’t been in trouble before, so it will be moved to a different location and released.

Tabish said FWP strongly recommends using electric fencing to keep bears away from livestock and chickens.