Article by Lynda La Rocca
Wildlife – August 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
TO THE UNINITIATED, it certainly looked like breaking and entering. But to my husband Steve and me, the splintered wood on the door of our detached garage meant one thing: The bear was back in town.
Granted, we’d never actually seen this burgling bruin. In fact, our only bear encounter during five years of living in Twin Lakes had occurred just weeks earlier, when a cub came around the corner of the garage as we were taking our dog Twink for her morning walk.
I don’t know who was more surprised: me, Steve, the cub, or Twink, who steadfastly refuses to bark at anything capable of eating her.
The moment it saw us, the jet-black cub pivoted gracefully despite its lumbering gait. Swiftly and literally without a sound, it vanished into the woods behind the house.
So why was a bear ambling around our back yard in broad daylight, seemingly oblivious to the noisy construction crew working nearby?
My tongue-in-cheek theory is that mama bear had sent her offspring on a reconnaissance mission to survey the garage door she’d been assaulting for two summers.
In truth, we don’t know what attacked that door. We assume it was a bear (although whether male or female is anyone’s guess) because there isn’t another critter in these parts capable of ripping a metal lock, hasp and all, from a wooden frame. And when a board was wrenched off the door this year, we figured it was the same bear, back for a repeat performance.
This is a perfect example of what can happen when humans are not “bear aware.” Normally, Steve and I are obsessive about not attracting bears to our property. We don’t have a vegetable garden, compost pile, or barbecue grill. We store pet food inside, take bird feeders down every evening, and never leave trash outdoors or in the garage. At least we didn’t until last year, when we wrapped a dead mouse, still in the trap that killed it, in a plastic bag. Without thinking, we tossed the bag into a lidded can in the garage that normally holds extra flowerpots.
The next morning, the garage door had been forced open. The can was open, too. The plastic bag and the mousetrap were on the lawn. Most of the mouse had been eaten.
It took only this single lapse in judgment to create a potential “problem” bear. Fortunately, our carelessness didn’t cause this bear — or us — any lasting harm. That’s partly because we’re fast learners. Realizing that the bear might come snooping around again this year, we made absolutely sure that it would find nothing edible. And so it moved on.
As for the cub, its appearance may have been coincidental. After all, Central Colorado is one of the homes of Ursus americanus, the American black bear.
According to the state Division of Wildlife, 8,000-12,000 black bears live in Colorado. That’s only a fraction of the 750,000 ranging across North America. And despite its name, this bear is not always black. Its fur can be brown, blond, even cinnamon-colored. These lighter bruins are sometimes mistaken for grizzlies, which historically inhabited Colorado but are not known to currently exist here. Grizzly or brown bears (now classified as a single species) are considerably larger and taller than black bears, however. Male black bears, which measure five to six feet when standing upright, top out at around 450 pounds. That’s half a ton less than their grizzly cousins.
NORMALLY SHY AND SOLITARY, except during mating season and when females are raising litters (usually two cubs, who stay with mom for at least one year), black bears lose their natural reticence when food is involved. Omnivores that eat everything from flowering plants, berries, nuts, and grasses, to insects, fish, small animals, and carrion, black bears can also develop a taste for human food. Those that do will break into houses and vehicles or tear up tents and campsites to get it.
In April, a bear crawled through the open window of a car near Stonewall in southern Colorado to feast on the lunch a ranch hand had left inside. When the unsuspecting worker emerged from a nearby outhouse, the bear was walking toward him. The bear swatted the man across the neck and shoulder, hurling him nearly 15 feet but causing only minor injuries. The ranch hand managed to return to his vehicle and the bear followed, amusing itself by chewing on the car’s tires until the man drove away.
Black bears just emerging from hibernation, as this one was, are particularly ravenous. So are bears preparing to hibernate. In the weeks preceding their snooze, which lasts from late October or early November to mid-April, they can feed each day for 20 hours, consuming as many as 20,000 calories daily.
Once denned in natural rock cavities, hollow logs, or beneath brush, black bears enter an unusual kind of hibernation during which they don’t eat, drink, eliminate bodily wastes — or fall completely asleep.
While the metabolism of bats, marmots, ground squirrels, and other true hibernators slows significantly, making body temperature and heart and respiration rates drop so dramatically that it can take several hours to rouse these creatures, hibernating black bears maintain fairly constant and near-normal body temperature and blood pressure. This enables them to awaken quickly should danger threaten.
BUT HIBERNATING OR AWAKE, the biggest threat to a bear’s well-being is — us.
While black bears can live up to 20 years in the wild, most don’t. Disease, accidents, starvation, and predation take some. But the majority fall victim to humans who hunt them, run them over, invade their habitat and, inadvertently or intentionally, entice them into potentially deadly situations.
Sometimes the bear wins. In the past century, there have been 56 documented cases of black bears in North America killing humans, according to the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota. Since 1998, the DOW has documented 26 non-fatal black bear attacks on humans in Colorado. Some were apparently unprovoked. Others occurred when a bear was startled or trying to protect cubs. One resulted from an 85-year-old woman’s misguided decision to feed a bear that had wandered into her yard.
In Colorado, intentionally feeding bears or leaving food outside in bear country is a misdemeanor punishable by fines starting at $100. But that’s nothing compared to what can happen to the bear. The state’s “two-strike” policy means that a bear breaking into homes or hanging around populated areas gets ear-tagged and tattooed for identification purposes the first time it’s caught. If that bear gets caught a second time, the DOW is mandated to destroy it.
And it’s not just “fed bears” that end up as dead bears. Any bruin that grows accustomed to our presence runs an equal risk. That means it’s not enough to keep bears away from trash and barbecue grills. We must keep them away from our homes, cars, neighborhoods, and campsites — for their sake.
Lynda La Rocca lives amid the wildlife in Twin Lakes, and writes for many publications which pay better than Colorado Central.
