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Boulder nonprofit works to harvest residential fruit trees before the bears do

Benjamin Buck, with Community Fruit Rescue, carries a box of apples recently harvested in a Boulder neighborhood. The nonprofit aims to harvest fruit in residential areas before bears do.
Sam Fuqua
/
KGNU
Benjamin Buck, with Community Fruit Rescue, carries a box of apples recently harvested in a Boulder neighborhood. The nonprofit aims to harvest fruit in residential areas before bears do.

On a sunny afternoon in September, half a dozen people pick apples from two large trees laden with fruit.

The trees are in Jessica Newman's yard, just north of Boulder, Colorado. One tree stands at least 30 feet high. Jasper, Newman's 9-year-old son, holds a pole that's twice as tall as he is, with a small basket on the end.

"There's this foam thing here, so you use the pointy, like, curved things to pull it down, and it just falls into the foam thing, and then you can bring it down," explained Jasper.

With the help of picking poles, volunteer harvesters from Community Fruit Rescue collected nearly 1,000 pounds of apples from the yard in about two hours, sorting them as they went.

Harvest coordinator Benjamin Buck says apples that are wormy or already on the ground will go to animal shelters.

"Those we'll donate to animals only," he said. "We won't put anything that's fallen on the ground to humans."

The good fruit picked from the trees is separated for human consumption.

"The nice ones are sent to local food banks," said Buck.

Tasha Snow, a harvest volunteer, is taking a break from her job as a NASA research scientist.

"I actually did this last year with a friend and it's like kind of fun to come out and meet people and be outside. The trees are always beautiful and it's nice to go home with a lot of apples afterwards and it's kind of a nice cause," she said.

After all the apples are picked and sorted, volunteers can choose a few to take home. In exchange for having their apples harvested, the homeowner donates to Community Fruit Rescue, a small Boulder-based nonprofit that coordinates events like this.

Melanie Hill, the group's executive director, says one goal of the harvest is to prevent human-bear conflicts.

"It's exciting to see a black bear. I love it," she said. "But we don't want them to stay too comfortable in town, where they pose a risk, or they get hurt, or unfortunately killed. They can be hit by cars. There's a lot of concerns there."

Two black bears were hit by cars in Boulder last year, and the city logs hundreds of bear sightings annually. Property owners who used Community Fruit Rescue in 2023 reported fewer bear sightings after the apple harvest.

Cassandre Venumiere Lefebvre, a conservation biologist at Colorado State University who surveyed the property owners for a pilot study, says that given a choice, black bears don’t want to be around people.

"Black bears particularly try to avoid humans as much as possible. So there is evidence of bears having increased heart rate when crossing roads, or avoiding human presence, voices, activity on trails, and avoiding developed areas," she said.

However, she says caution is overruled by appetite at this time of year, as human settlements provide what biologists call "attractants."

"Garbage is the main one, but ripe fruit on private properties... or along alleys, ornamental trees from the town."

Colorado wildlife officials say the state has a stable population of 17,000 to 20,000 bears while the human population continues to grow. The Denver metro area, including Boulder, has added more than 400,000 people in the past 10 years.

Community Fruit Rescue also offers tree care workshops throughout the year.

"Just teaching people this is the time when you would fertilize and mulch and think about pest control, or this is when you would prune your fruit trees and try and encourage stronger branching structures so that you have more fruit growing and more nutritious and bigger fruits too," explained Melanie Hill.

"Same things with selective thinning, so you don't have a ton of fruit here where it's breaking branches."

Hill says pruning a tree correctly at the right time of year helps it stay healthy and prevents it from being overburdened by fruit.

"Honestly, the tree care helps us just to have an easier harvest, too, because we have some trees that are just so dense with branches and fruit. It's hard to get a picker pole up there to get any of the fruit and just to be able to reach it," she said.

Homeowner Jessica Newman says she recently saw a bear on the road and found scat by her house, so she's glad to have help with her apples.

"It's way more fruit than we can handle. It also attracts things like bears and other predators. And so the fact that folks can come and take this fruit and provide it to people who need food and will use it is really valuable to us," said Newman.

So far this year, Community Fruit Rescue volunteers have harvested more than 14 tons of residential apples.

Copyright 2024 KGNU.

This story was shared with KSUT via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including KSUT.

Sam Fuqua
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