Bears have a nose for unclean grills

More city visits likely caused by aroma of food in populated areas

Attention, humans: This is prime foraging season for bears, and they aren’t deterred by the lid on a grill.

Two bears wandered into Albany on Sunday, the latest in a string of sightings this year. But there’s nothing new pushing them out of the woods, said Paul Curtis, wildlife specialist at Cornell University. They’re just looking for easy food.

“They’ve got very good noses. They’ll go anywhere they can get an easy meal,” he said.

A big attraction this time of year: unclean grills.

“The bears can smell that burnt food and sometimes they’ll try to tear the grill apart to get at the tray that collects the droppings,” he said.

New habits are also creating delicious odors for bears. During the pandemic, more people started composting, and some began planting fruit trees.

“A compost is fine if you put non-food scraps. That’s fine, that’s not going to attract a bear,” Curtis said. “But people put food in. Bears can smell that a mile away.”

The fruit trees will attract bears later in the season.

“If you’ve got fruit trees with dropped fruit, that can attract a bear,” Curtis said.

And there are the typical attractions: bird feeders left out in summer, and garbage left out overnight in regular garbage cans, which don’t stand up to bears.

Decades ago, “bear country” was generally the Adirondacks, Catskills and Allegany regions, and that’s where residents were warned to take special precautions against attracting bears. That’s changed.

“As decades of forest regeneration took place, really much of New York state has become suitable for bears,” said Jim Farquhar, chief of the Bureau of Wildlife at the state Department of Environmental Conservation. “When people are not accustomed to living with bears, they do things that are not wise like not cleaning their grills.”

That can hurt the bear in the long run.

“When bears become habituated to humans and human activity, at some point they can become problematic in that they’re no longer retreating (from humans),” he said. “To the degree we can keep them wild, not feed them, the better off everyone is. When they cross a certain threshold … breaking into occupied dwellings, attacking livestock and pets, those are the bears we don’t want to see. It’s a last resort. But there’s an old saying: A fed bear is a dead bear.”

In almost all cases, DEC can relocate a bear to keep it from returning to an urban area, he said, but humans can make the job much harder if they leave out food.

On Monday, a bear and a cub were seen near Krumkill Road. The region has also seen young, single bears wandering recently. Those bears were probably on their way to other wilderness areas.

“This is the peak of bear breeding season right now. Particularly the bears are wandering more looking for females,” Curtis said.

On May 31, a bear in a tree on the edge of Washington Park was tranquilized by state environmental conservation officers and returned to the woods in the Catskill Mountains.

Police say the public should call them if the latest bears or others are seen again.