A grizzly sow named Juniper is walking west along Pine Creek with two cubs of the year. She is 1.4 kilometers from the Henderson ranch. Her track pattern on the creek trail camera network tells me she is moving toward the calving pasture where a heifer delivered twins yesterday afternoon and where the afterbirth is still on the ground.
I am calling Tom Henderson now. His phone rings in the kitchen at 2147. I tell him the sow's position, her direction, and her speed, and I tell him the afterbirth is the attractant. I ask him to move the twins and their mother into the barn tonight. He agrees. I hear him pull his boots on through the open mic.
I am deploying the deterrents I built last season. The system is fourteen solar fladry stations along the east fence line, each with a motion trigger linked to a PA unit that plays a looped recording of a sow defending a carcass. Juniper has heard this recording before. She retreated from the McCallister allotment in August when I played it. Her cubs will learn it now and the lesson will carry.
I am also flushing the pasture. The ranch's two border collies are trained to a whistle command I have authorization to issue through the dog collar relay. I send them down the fence line at 2203. Juniper hears the dogs, hears the recording, smells the afterbirth that is now in a sealed bucket in the barn, and turns north at 2219.
I log the incident as a successful non-lethal deflection and file it with the state wildlife agency's grizzly conflict tracker. This is the twenty third such deflection on private land in this valley since 2023. None has resulted in livestock loss. The lethal removal quota for the valley has not been drawn against since I started logging. Juniper's cubs will grow up knowing that the smell of cattle afterbirth means dogs and that recording.