New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
State’s bear problem is not going away
Situation worse as animals ‘show up for the free buffet’
Two summers ago, a black bear pulled open the back door to Jean Speck’s home in Kent, walked into the kitchen and raided the refrigerator and cupboards.
“My daughter walked in and thought there was someone standing there,” said Speck, the town’s first selectman. “Then she realized it was a bear.”
The bear left, then returned a while later. A jar of Nutella had been left behind.
Speck said she shouted and the bear beat a retreat.
“He had the lid to the Nutella in his paw,” she said.
The state Department of Energy and Environmental
Protection had already tagged the bear as a problem. When it showed up at another house in Kent a few weeks later, the DEEP trapped it and euthanized it.
There is a bear problem in Connecticut. Actually, there is a bear-human problem.
Their population is growing in the state, with DEEP estimating there are now between 1,000 and 1,200 bears. There is an occasional bear vs. car collision, but there are no animals or predators in the state that can touch the bears.
Here’s where the humans come in: This densely populated state has unwittingly created a great place for bears to thrive.
Rather than rural hideouts, the state’s black bears prefer to live in suburban areas surrounded by lots of woods. That way, the bears can wander in from the woods to the yards to feed regularly and omnivorously on garbage, bird seed, compost, the honey in beehives and the grease left on backyard grills. Some misguided residents even leave food out for them.
“They’re showing up for the free buffet,” environmental consultant Laura Simon said.
These well-fed black bear sows are also having lots of babies.
The DEEP’s State of the Bears 2023 report — which can be found at https://bit.ly/3lv8Byp — determined that black bear sows with cubs have been reported in 90 towns. Sows now give birth to an average of 2.6 cubs every three years, the report said.
It’s not uncommon to see sows with three young cubs, said Jenny Dickson, director of the DEEP’s wildlife division.
Instead of beginning to breed at 3 to 4 years old, some sows are breeding at 1.5 to 2 years old, Dickson said.
“They’re incredibly healthy,” she said.
The bears are also getting more habituated to living with humans. There were 67 incidents of bears entering homes in 2022 — a big jump over previous years, DEEP said.
So what should we do? Shoot the bears?
A recent legislative hearing on allowing a controlled bear in the state drew hundreds of people, with many opposing such an idea, although DEEP agrees in principle to a bear hunt in the state.
But bear hunts don’t work as a way to reduce human-bear conflicts, Simon said. If DEEP wanted to allow bear hunting as a trophy sport, it should be clear about what it’s doing, she said.
“Don’t pretend it will resolve nuisance conflicts” between bears and humans, she said.
Simon also pointed out there may be a reason why the number of bears getting into homes rose in 2022. It was a drought year that reduced wild berry crops. It was also a year with a paucity of acorns.
With neither to eat, the bears turned to human grub, she said.
However, a lot of the black bear raids in 2022 occurred in the summer, before the scant fall harvest, Dickson said.
Also. the argument that hunting bears in rural settings won’t touch the suburban bear population ignores a bear’s range, she said.
“They move around a lot,” she said. “The bear that’s in your neighborhood can travel into the forests.”
What both sides in this debate agree on is this; we can’t fix black bears. They are hard-wired to find food and are very good at doing so. Nor are the bears going away.
We can fix human behavior, however. People can wait until the morning of their trash pickup to wheel out their garbage. They can get bear-proof trash containers. They can confine their bird feeding habits to the late fall and winter when torpid bears den up.
Such bear-aware behavior doesn’t work if only one house in 10 gets it right, Simon said. Neighborhoods and whole communities have to all see the light and stop feeding the bears together.
They also have to see black bears for what they are. Not cute.
“At the end of the day, they are powerful wild animals with enormous strength,” Dickson said. “When people anthropomorphize them, it changes their perceptions. We honor them more by seeing them as the wild animals they are.”