One family at Lake Tahoe recently reported that a black bear had walked through their sliding screen door as they were eating breakfast. The bear sat in a chair, put its head on the table and looked longingly toward a plate of bacon. It fled only when one of the shocked residents swatted its nose with a spoon.
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Bears are peeling the doors off Jeeps in Yosemite and breaking into homes in Truckee. They have marched into new territory like Marin and Salinas. One bit a Sierra hiker recently while another jumped on a Boy Scout and tried to claw off his backpack.
“It has become unbalanced,” said Ann Bryant, director of the non-profit BEAR League, an animal protection group in the Lake Tahoe basin. “They have always been afraid of people, but they are not anymore. For a bear to think he has got the right to come in and sit in a person’s house like a dog, this is abnormal, friendly behavior.”
The BEAR League’s telephone hot line is getting up to 75 calls a day reporting bear sightings and encounters, a spike over recent years. It was Bryant who took the phone call from the family that ran into the bear over breakfast.
California’s black bears are having a busy summer. And if tourists believe that they saw more bears during a summer trip to the woods this year–and that they were a little more brazen, wildlife experts say it wasn’t just imagination.
“Things started happening earlier, and it looks like it is going to be a lot worse this year,” said Doug Updike, a senior wildlife biologist with the California Fish and Game Department.
At Yosemite National Park, which has one of the nation’s most sophisticated and well-funded bear management programs, park officials documented 214 human-bear incidents by midsummer. Bears are breaking into cars, stealing food from campsites and charging campers–bluff charges, so far.
Encounters are up 150 percent over last year during the same period.
Indeed, there have been “weird things” happening this summer, said Sherri Licius, a wildlife technician with Yosemite’s bear management team.
The group educates park visitors about preventing bear problems, patrols the valley each night to scare off food scavengers and responds to car break-ins. It was set up in 1998, after the park recorded a record 1,584 bear incidents and more than $600,000 in property damage.
On a recent night, Licius walked through the parking lot of Yosemite’s Curry Village, peering in car windows to see whether coolers or other food was stashed inside. Sometimes, park officials leave warning slips on cars and, in more extreme cases, fine or tow away cars with too much food inside.
It doesn’t take much–even a stick of gum or suntan lotion–to attract a bear’s strong sense of smell, she said. As if to illustrate the point, she stopped at a sport-utility vehicle with a shattered window and pointed to paw prints on the vehicle.
She peered inside and guessed it was a bag of toiletries that attracted a bear to the vehicle.
In the span of five hours that night, Licius and her team found five cars that had been broken into by bears, including a Jeep in the Ahwahnee Hotel’s parking lot. Its passenger door was peeled off by a bear that wanted to empty the contents of a cooler inside.
The bear management team uses radio telemetry collars to track the movements of nine bears in Yosemite Valley. On this particular night, wildlife technician Jeremiah McCurdy followed the signal of a 10-year-old female with a penchant for raiding the parking lot of Curry Village and its surrounding orchards.
When the bear stopped and eyed him from under a streetlamp, McCurdy raised his arms and yelled, “Get out of here, bear!” He finally chased her up a tree.
“See, she’s already putting on weight. She’s eating profusely,” said McCurdy, eyeing her from below. “We are just glad she’s still afraid of humans.”
While they don’t have to use them this night, the team will also sometimes set off noisy pyrotechnics and fire rubber bullets at bears to teach them humans should be feared, a lesson they hope will save the bears’ lives and keep Yosemite’s visitors safe.
Licius and her colleagues say the intelligent and adaptable animals over the years have gotten better at getting people’s food.
The park has stopped telling backpackers to hang their food from a tree because the bears have figured out how to swat it down. Yosemite has invested in sturdier bear boxes, trash cans and dumpsters because the bears figured out how to open the old ones.
Bears spy on hikers
The animals are even known to watch campers unpack from a distance, to see whether they accidentally leave food outside.
“Every time we think of a way to thwart them, they find another way,” said Licius, who said she believes the bears recognize the sounds of her truck and know to avoid her when she drives up.
“It’s almost like an arms race,” added Yosemite park ranger Deb Schweizer.
Park visitors are often thrilled when they get the chance to see a bear.
Stephanie McDonald, a 17-year-old from Burlingame who was camping in Yosemite’s Upper Pines Campground recently, said her family was excited to see a bear every night for a week.
“This is the most we have ever seen,” McDonald said. “It’s cool.”
But biologists are concerned, especially when they hear reports about tourists so determined to photograph bears that they feed them by hand. The BEAR League’s Bryant tells the story of a father who smeared peanut butter on his 4-year-old son’s face so a black bear could lick it off.
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“That’s where we work to re-educate people. Don’t make [bears] feel comfortable,” Bryant said. “If a bear is persistently hanging around, you’ve got to take the food source away and be mean to them.”
This year, Yosemite rangers had to deal with two young bears that had learned to charm campers into giving them food. The bears would nuzzle up to campers’ legs in exchange for potato chips or snacks.
Last month, one of the emboldened yearlings decided to forgo the cuddling and go after a snack inside an 11-year-old Boy Scout’s backpack by jumping on his back.
The boy escaped with scrapes, but for public safety reasons, park officials killed the young bear and its mother, who rangers said had encouraged the bold behavior by teaching her cubs how to scour campsites for food.
Then, a few weeks ago, a backpacker hiking in the Inyo National Forest was bitten on the shoulder by a bear. The bear was attracted to the hiker because his food was not properly stored in a bear-resistant canister, said Julie Molzahn, a spokeswoman for Inyo. The camper escaped with a bruised shoulder, but the bear was put to death.
Not too aggressive
Typical black bears are no more aggressive toward humans than Labrador retrievers. No human has ever been killed by a black bear in California, something that can’t be said about deer. A buck once gored a man to death in Yosemite.
But when wild animals are no longer afraid of people, their aggressive behavior can escalate, and rangers have to kill them lest they become a danger to people. Private landowners are also entitled to get state permits to kill bears that have damaged their property.
Fatal black bear maulings have occurred in other states. And, weighing from 200 up to 500 pounds, a black bear can unintentionally seriously hurt a human with just a single slap from a powerful paw.
“It’s a disgrace when we have to go into an area where people have been training bears not to be wild,” wildlife biologist Updike said. “They are relatively carefree animals, but when they get trained to be a mooch, we essentially put a death sentence on them.”
But the surge of bear activity this summer may not simply be the result of humans making food available to the animals.
There actually seem to be more bears. Updike said the black bear population had grown to more than 30,000 statewide, a record. The black bears are also being spotted in areas where they historically haven’t lived, such as Marin County, San Diego County, Salinas and Carmel.
Bryant has her own theories about what is going on. She said the Tahoe area had a record number of bear births last year. As yearlings leave their mothers now, they get in trouble.
“It’s like a 17-year-old kid without his parents. They don’t know the rules,” Bryant said. “When they’re little, people feed them, so they get tame. When they grow and get to be yearlings, they still expect to be fed. The bears don’t realize they have grown bigger.”