AMC Outdoors, September 2005

Last month, in an odd bit of timing, I was walking the dog on an old abandoned logging road behind my house when she unexpectedly raced ahead and I heard an explosion of barking a few dozen yards away. I rounded the next bend, steeling myself, and ended up about 30 feet away from a black bear stretching on his hind legs to reach a blackberry patch. I can’t say how big he was, only that he was much, much taller than I and shimmered with an eggplant-black sheen. He lowered himself to all fours and we stared at each other. As my dog leapt and yelped all around him, he kept his big, black head stayed trained in my direction. After half a minute or so, the bear backed up a few steps and lumbered off into the brush.

I admit this was a modest encounter. But it showed me how powerful and mysterious the presence of bears is, and how complicated it is to share space with them. Standing there eye-to-eye, adrenaline tickling my fingertips and scalp, I felt I was seeing something I wasn’t meant to, something private and profound. The backwoods I walk in several times a week instantly moved up a notch in wildness. I felt small and giddy, blood pulsing as the dog and I hoofed it home.

A few days later, Ed, our new Executive Editor, reported waking in the night to hear a bear loudly making off with the dog food he kept stored in his garage at his home in New Hampshire. A nuisance for sure, but he was still transfixed, grabbing a video camera to record the sizable robber.

While bear sightings like these are becoming increasingly common, it is still difficult to come close to one and not react viscerally. Bears, like koalas, whales, and wolves, are what biologists call “charismatic megafauna,” abundantly appealing because of their size, beauty, or personality—and often on the receiving end of a significant amount of concern from the public.

Black bears, however, have gotten a pretty mixed bag of concern, depicted sometimes as a fearsome brute, teeth bared and claws slashing, other times assuming a more human guise, inspiring cartoons and fabric softener ads. Last century, beloved Teddy bears rolled off assembly lines at the same time newspapers printed murderous-sounding accounts of ursine interactions.

And today, as the Northeast’s bear populations soar, human-bear encounters are becoming everyday occurrences. Scientists talk about peaceful co-existence, but what will it take for humans to understand the black bear and accomplish this?

Lynn Rogers has been called the Jane Goodall of bears. Like most people, Rogers grew up with the fierce picture of bears in his head. But in his 38 years of “seeing real bears do nothing,” the researcher and founder of the North American Bear Center eventually let those images go. And now his mission, especially in areas like ours, is to get them out of the mind of the American public. Rogers’ motivation, he says, is his “continuing curiosity about how they live—and how bears and people can better coexist.” He sees a unique opportunity for this in the Northeast. “Black bear numbers are expanding in New England,” he says. “But even though there are more people, there’s more appreciation of wildlife. Some people really want to learn about bears.”

And learning opportunities abound. In every Northeast state, officials have ramped up education programs with the goal of minimizing human-bear encounters. Massachusetts is piloting a bear-resistant container program in state parks. Vermont’s Act 250 protects vital wildlife habitats from large development projects. In Pennsylvania, the Game Commission leads field trips to instill an understanding—and a sense of pride—in the state’s thriving bear population. And others are caught up in intense debates around hunting as a means to control bear populations: in New Jersey, the question of reinstating a controlled hunt has been under the microscope for years, while Maine voters defeated a measure last fall that would have banned the controversial practice of bear baiting.

Meantime, bears are sauntering down Main Street in urban Haverhill, Mass., rifling through garbage cans and tossing birdfeeders all over Vernon, N.J., and popping up with increasing frequency in the backcountry, from the Delaware Water Gap to the Whites. Though some of the factors have changed, the story has not. It’s a cycle we have experienced more than once in the Northeast.

The Shy Survivors

Native Americans revered the abundant black bear, not only as a source of food, clothing, and tools, but as a wise kindred spirit, writes Michael Furtman in Black Bear Country. The Algonquins called the bear “Grandfather.” The constellation Ursa Major was simultaneously seen as a she-bear in ancient Greece, Babylon, India, China, and North America. (Impressive when you consider it doesn’t much resemble a bear.) The black bear was said to have taught early Native Americans the ways of herbal medicine and holds its place as a clan totem in many tribes. Sacred rituals preceded and followed the bear hunt, in which profuse thanks were offered to the animals that sacrificed themselves for humankind.

Early European settlers were no stranger to the grizzly, a close relative of the European brown bear, but the American black bear, ursus americanus, was a beast of a different stripe—and more than a little puzzling to them. A 1777 monograph by scientist Jean Baptiste Zauschner depicts a kindly looking black bear, and presents it as a newly discovered species.

A skeleton found in Pennsylvania, however, proved that black bears were likely living here as many as 500,000 years ago. They are survivors; their characteristic shyness and tendency to stay in the deeper forest served them well against their original and now-extinct foe, the fierce short-faced bear, and with the later arrival of the grizzly to North America.

But it hasn’t been an easy ride. Two hundred years ago, especially in New England, much of that deep-forest habitat had been cut for farmland. As they did with wolves, farmers imposed bounties on black bears ($5 a head on average). This extreme habitat loss and frenzied hunting sent remaining bears packing to safe mountaintop areas and their numbers began a steady decline.

With bears nearly gone in New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and Connecticut by the late 1800s, these states stopped offering bounties. But the enemy status was hard to shake. The New York Times reported on the incredible bear rebound in Maine—along with the growing desire there to reinstate a big hunt. In New York, legislators passed a 1905 law that made killing a black bear punishable by a $50 fine everywhere except Essex County. In Vermont, which had seen a marked recovery in its bear population by 1920, farmers clamored to have the state bear bounty restored.

With a somewhat knee-jerk reaction to the seesawing populations and with an incomplete understanding of bear biology and habitat need, many states’ bounties stayed on the books until the 1960s (Virginia’s remained until 1977). In the four decades since, though, diminished hunting and the gradual reforestation of farmland have allowed bear numbers to recover. New York and Maine’s populations have since quadrupled. And now, as more and more people move into territory that has become bear-friendly forest, it’s déjà vu all over again.

Bearable Behavior

Nearly every state in our region is working hard to educate residents on the realities of the black bear. Negative perceptions linger, however, including the notion that this species is a dangerous killer.

Three fatal attacks in the last decade—the Brooklyn infant snatched during a picnic in the Catskills cabin, the schoolteacher killed in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Canadian biathlete mauled while running on a track in Québec—briefly seized public imagination, but as Rogers says, death by black bear is extremely rare and is usually the work of a so-called “rogue bear.” In the last century, black bears have killed just 52 people across all of North America. “For each person killed by a black bear,” he explains, “there are two killed by grizzly, 45 by dogs, 249 by lightning, and 60,000 by fellow humans.”

In all his years working with bears, Rogers attests, “I’ve never had one come after me and hurt me.” And he claims to have never met an agitated bear he couldn’t scare off with a shout and a stomp of his foot. Of the attacks that do happen, Rogers distinguishes them as defensive or offensive. The latter are unprovoked, predatory, and “incredibly rare.” He calls it defensive behavior when “bears [treat] people as they would treat other bears with bad manners. These usually have something to do with food and are very easy to avoid.” (See sidebar.)

Gary Alt heads the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s bear-tagging study and says, “We’ve been shocked at how wild bears can adapt to high human densities, given a chance.” Rogers agrees, describing black bears as creatures “ruled by restraint, not ferocity.”

Another quality Rogers notes is their ability to build mental maps. When following foraging bears, it seems as though they’re zigzagging randomly. But then, says Rogers, you see that they’re always hitting a new area. “It’s very complex,” he says. “They know every escape tree.”

The combination of mapmaking skills and an unfettered devotion to eating tends to get bears into trouble. Bears, like humans, like to go where they’re welcome. So when pickings get slim in their regular food-supply areas, they tend to tromp off to where they’ve found food before. If that was in your backyard, even just once, they’ll probably be back.

Though we often hear about the donut-addicted bruin, research by Rogers and others suggests that bears actually prefer their natural food sources if they can get them and will probably still choose to forage.

But if chicken bones and yogurt containers are second best, why are both nuisance and damage reports increasing at such a rapid rate? In New Jersey alone, the nuisance number doubled to 487 in 2004, while there were 1,208 damage reports in 2003, up from 285 a decade earlier. Like a bear market on Wall Street, it’s all about supply and demand. When things are good, when the winter’s been mild or the spring nice and wet, bear sightings in towns go down. They’ll be out in the forest instead, enjoying insects, bees, fish, carrion, and the occasional fawn—along with the succulent, early vegetation, aquatic plants, wild calla, lettuce, dandelion, clover, acorns, hickory and beechnuts, wild grape, and cherry. If this is starting to sound like what’s in the Northeast’s woods (and a bit like what your favorite health magazine might recommend for you) you’re onto something. When these crops are abundant, says Rogers, bears have incredibly healthy, fruitful reproductive systems. And so their numbers increase. Couple this with a harsh winter the next year, though, and those additional hungry bears are going to be wandering farther afield—a range of up to 100 square miles—looking for something to eat.

Noise in the ’Hood

But, as the biologist stresses, it’s humans’ tolerance and understanding of the bear—not just the food supply—that will determine whether the bear population continues to grow and the bear-human relationship become more simpatico. He believes this tolerance will increase if people learn more about trusting black bears’ shy, quasi-vegetarian ways and stop fearing them.

As Furtman writes, “Those black bears that don’t challenge people...that stay away from garbage cans...are the ones that live the longest and will reproduce the most times. Our world keeps reinforcing the black bear’s natural proclivity for secretiveness.” In places like New Jersey and Massachusetts, where suburbanites are challenged by nuisance bears, the equation has gone something like this: we move into what was bear country, nature intervenes with a harsh winter, bears get hip to the delicacies in our garbage cans, and ipso facto, a whole lot more frantic calls to Fish & Wildlife to “do something!”

What these agencies are trying to do, however, is get residents to make changes. Jane Shaw is a senior fellow at PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center, in Bozeman, Mont., and has been studying the economy of sprawl and the suburbs. “It’s a two-sided coin,” she says. “People are moving out into wilder areas. And because the suburbs are relatively compatible with a lot of animals, there’s a lot more coexistence occurring. It is a serious problem, but what it shows me is that the suburbs are not sterile places. They are surprisingly attractive environments for wildlife.”

Shaw’s talking about the bird- and bunny-friendly landscaping that most homeowners in the suburbs go for. And she brings up an important point. If we are going to continue this trend of moving into bear country and behaving in ways that attract wildlife, we can’t fully expect a sterile existence.

And that’s where personal responsibility comes into state bear-management plans. As Shaw says, “I think we do need to take responsibility when we live in these places.” Land managers face the challenge of keeping the intricate web of hunters, recreationists, homeowners, and bears healthy and balanced. Not an easy job, but some are succeeding. Massachusetts is often held up as a model of this balance because bear population growth is slow enough to give the state time to educate residents on changing their behavior around the animals. But Jim Cardoza, biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, believes people must increase their awareness of bears—and quickly. “Our capacity has been reached,” he says.

Karen Hershey, spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Division of Fish and Wildlife, faces a similar picture: “There have been sightings in all 21 counties in New Jersey this year,” she says. In one home last year, a mother came home with pre-school kids to find a bear had broken in and trashed the kitchen.

So how many bears are out there and how fast is the population growing? The numbers are difficult to reckon, but there are about 50,000 black bears in the Northeast region (by comparison Alaska has twice that amount). Counting bears is difficult; they are secretive loners and they cross borders of small Northeastern states frequently. In New Jersey, says Hershey, “we shy away from making an estimate—it’s a mobile, fluid population.”

Good Will Hunting?

Bears in the Garden State have made the front page recently as the environmental commissioner and two governors have both called for and then rescinded a hunt due to popular pressure. After several lawsuits, the Supreme Court last December issued a decision that the state could not introduce bear hunting without a detailed bear-management plan, which is now in the works.

Currently, every state that has a significant bear population has a hunt, says Brian Bachman, founder of the North American Bear Foundation, a conservation group. He adds there really is no alternative to hunting when too many bears live near too many people. Bachman contends it’s one piece of a healthy bear-management toolbox. And though our regional history shows a sometimes different result, he says measures like a short hunting season and limiting one bear per hunter offer sustainable solutions to keep numbers in check.

Clearly, not everyone espouses this view. I asked Lynn Rogers if bear-lovers can actually be pro-hunting. Yes, says Rogers, who serves on an advisory panel for the New Jersey debate, though he looks at each situation individually. “Some states don’t have enough bears to support a hunt. I commend many of the managers in New England for having a hunt limited enough to allow bears to slowly increase where people can learn to live with them,” he says.

While they work on their management plan, New Jersey officials are attempting to minimize bear-human interactions by training as many agencies and individuals as they can. So far, says Hershey, they’ve had 600 such sessions, teaching the common-sense principles outlined in their “Living in Bear Country” program. (See sidebar for similar suggestions from New Hampshire.)

Though there have been many calls to her agency, “none of us would designate this as an emergency,” says Hershey. “This year there are an increased number of bear sightings. But our team is doing a very good job with training.”

Bears have adjusted pretty well to having us in their territory. And it really doesn’t take a whole lot for us to adjust to being in theirs. As PERC’s Shaw reminds, “If you move into a fire-prone area, you don’t complain when the forest fire comes through—you protect your house before it does.” After hundreds of years spent trying to master the bear, it might be time for us to take what we’ve learned and see if we really can peacefully co-exist.

—Madeleine Eno is Editor-At-Large of AMC Outdoors.