TOO MUCH TO BEAR

Dry upstate summer leads to dangerous encounters

The hot summer isn’t just sending straphangers into a tizzy — it’s putting more upstate bears on a collision course with humans.

Complaints of nuisance bears have more than doubled to 1,191 this year from just over 500 in 2017, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

The bears are hunting for human food — foraging in campsites and trash heaps — because their usual diet of grasses, berries and insects was severely depleted by the early summer drought, experts say.

“Until recently we had a very dry summer,” said Jim Farquhar, the DEC’s wildlife bureau chief. “That really curtails the development of natural food for bears.”

Most of the bear encounters happened in places where New Yorkers love to camp and vacation — 338 in the Lower Hudson Valley, 233 in the Northern Catskills/Capital region and 310 in the Eastern Adirondacks/Lake Champlain area.

In early July, a 5-year-old girl heard scratching in the middle of the night at the screen door to her family’s cabin in a camp near Narrowsburg in the Catskills. When she opened the door, she was faceto-face with a juvenile black bear. She screamed and the curious interloper scampered away.

An even bolder mama bear almost drove away with the family van in Old Forge, in the Adirondacks. Surveillance footage shows the animal opening the front and side doors to the van and hopping in. Less than a minute later, her four cubs come loping out of the woods to follow her inside.

The DEC has also been warning recreation-seekers in recent weeks of a particularly persistent bear lurking around the eastern High Peaks of the Adirondacks. Forest rangers shot the bothersome bear with rubber buckshot to “make sure it was wary of people,” Farquhar said.

Complaints are also up because the bear population has boomed in the past decade. There are 7,000 bears in New York state, and Cornell University researchers counted one black bear every 3 square miles in a recent survey of the Catskills and Allegheny Mountains.

From 1960 through 2011, 10 people were hurt and one killed in wild bear encounters in New York, according to the DEC. But the bears haven’t hurt anyone this year, Farquhar said.

“Bears generally just retreat and get out of the way,” Farquhar said. “They have a tendency not to be aggressive, but act aggressive and sort of bluff and scare people off.”

They also have “excellent” memories and “will often recognize a cooler as potential food and paw around and be able to open it,” Farquhar said. “Tearing down bird feeders, smashing grills, getting into a chicken coop. Those are the kinds of things we see.”