On September 1, 2026, at 1:00 PM, the City of Golden hosted a Bear Aware community event at an unspecified location. Management Analyst Claire welcomed attendees, introduced Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) District Wildlife Manager Philip Sorensen as the primary presenter, and noted the presence of city sustainability staff to discuss trash management. The event was live-streamed and recorded for later viewing.
Alright, everybody, can you hear me okay? Okay. Um, I'm Claire. I am a management analyst with the city. Um, and we want to welcome you all to our bearware event. We've got Philip Sorensen here who is from CPW. It's gonna be running through a presentation, answering some questions. Um, our community services team is here as well. Um, and our sustainability manager is here to talk about trash. Um so run through the presentation and then we'll do a bit of a QA. If you have a question for the QA, we are gonna ask that you go to the mic, um, just because we're live streaming, um, and it's not gonna pick up on your voices when you're shouting from the audience. Um if you have mobility issues or if you um feel like you can't make it back there, just wave your hand to me and I'll bring you a mic. Um, but yeah, we should be good to get started. This will be available, um, recorded online. We'll post, so feel free to share afterward, and yeah, I'll hand it over to Philip. All right. Thank you. Can everybody hear me all right? Yes. All righty. My name is Philip. I'm one of the local wildlife officers or district wildlife managers for the golden area. Um, you guys are kind of in a nexus where we have some different staff that all come into play. So if you're on the west end of town, you may be a completely different group of officers. I cover highway 58 north and highway 93 east. So I cover Golden Out to Brighton. Um, our current more southern golden officer is currently vacant, but should be filled here in January. So we'll have a new officer uh in place there. Um, Golden Id, I kind of just want to give some general bear information. I usually start off with some general bear knowledge, biology, what drives a bear, and then we kind of get into some conflict, some solutions. Um, and then at the end, hopefully we've got some time for some questions if we need to get anything wrapped up there, and there may be some other folks that jump in at different points. We all good. Right. I'm sorry, you're gonna have to crane your neck, so uh just to jump to the side here. But um, first one I always start off with because we get endless calls about a grizzly bear or a panda bear in my backyard. In Colorado, we only have one species of bear, and that is Ursus Americanis, which is the American black bear. But as you can see, they come in all different color phases. That's what we call them. So that top one would be more of a cinnamon color. Um, that one down below we kinda we call it kind of a grizzled cinnamon brown. The jet black is what is most synonymous, uh, obviously with their name. And then over there on the far side, we've got more of a blonde face. And we get them in all different mixes, and you'll see sows that are jet black and their cubs may be all different colors. Um, but just wanted to start clarifying that. We don't have any grizzly bears in Colorado. Those were extirpated from the state back in the 1970s. Um, they're pretty different for the most part. Um we don't have them here in Colorado, and I don't want to dwell on it too long, but just looking at anatomy, black bears have much shorter, more curved claws. That's really helpful for climbing trees, which is really helpful when you're trying to evade a grizzly bear, which is the one on the other side. Those big claws are used for digging, rolling over rocks.