Bear encounters on the rise in the Pacific Northwest

The Register Guard calls it the Year of the Bear.

So many bear encounters have been reported this year that federal wildlife officials are working overtime, the newspaper reports.

Snarling, jaw-popping, false-charging, burglarizing, vandalizing black bears, ravenous thanks to a lousy spring berry crop, have descended on residences from Florence to Waldport in recent weeks with such unrelenting frequency that wildlife officials can barely keep up with the phone calls. In the past two weeks alone, eight bears have been trapped and euthanized or shot dead by threatened landowners, bringing the year's total to an unprecedented 15 slain creatures.

The agent who handles bear calls for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Lincoln County has racked up 50 hours of overtime in the past two weeks. Wildlife biologists set a trap at popular Honeyman State Park on Thursday after reports of a young black bear roaming the campground, pilfering food from picnic tables and knocking over coolers, prompting parks workers to hand out flyers at every campsite.

That kind of brash behavior hasn't happened at Honeyman in a decade.

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“This is definitely the worst year for bears,” Holden said. “I see them all the time.”

Why? That’s where things get a little puzzling. Bears killed by hunters earlier this spring were inordinately fat, Cottam said, a sign that they’d settled into winter with plenty of bodily reserves from autumn foraging. But there were also big bear problems in the fall and into December, Cottam added, perhaps the result of residents feeding them.

And if they were fat in February, they were famished by May, thanks to a late spring and a tepid berry crop. The marginal weather may have hindered plant pollination, Cottam added.

“Two or three homeowners have told me they’re getting no fruit on their peach, apple and cherry trees,” Cottam said. “One fellow I talked to yesterday had a series of Gravenstein apples that are early blooming and ripening. He’s always had bears eating apples in the month of August, but this year they’ve already been there and eaten them while they’re still tiny, tart and sour. He’s never had bear damage in his apple trees in July.”

The clashes with residents suggest bears are foraging farther and wider for food — whether it’s there or not. At Honeyman, past bear problems were largely eradicated in the 1990s by shifting garbage storage to a centralized location and bear-proofing it. But that hasn’t kept the bear from ravaging camp.

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One worrisome explanation for their continued — and worsening — presence is this: driven into residential areas by a scarce food supply, the bears who’ve discovered easy pickings have no reason to head back out into the woods, now that they’ve acclimated to humans and are seemingly unafraid to bust into houses.

“They’re definitely opportunists,” Cottam said. “They’re all about food. When they discover food sources in town, they’re just going to keep coming back to it. The bear in the campground, that bear is not going anywhere if he continues to get food out of coolers.”

More: http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/dt.cms.support.viewStory.cls?cid=124517&sid=1&fid=1
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The fish & wildlife serve has a saying: "a fed bear is a dead bear."

http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/e-resources/ebooks/records/eeu3373.html

The earth is getting annoyed with our unchecked growth.

Did you hear about the rain in Antarctica?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1034590/The-baby-Antarctic-penguins-frozen-death-freak-rain-storms.html

in the Anchorage bowl, I read an article yesterday that it has been a deadly year for bears around here.

Your right, "A fed bear is a dead bear".

:cry: