black bears and catering
the interface of populations
Today is most welcome yet somehow jarring for the first day of summer. The welcome part is the steady raindrops falling all day, many blown by gale force winds. Certainly the projected two inches of rain over the next couple of days won’t eradicate our 12 inch deficit but ti will help quench the thirst of nearby fields of corn and other crops. As I drove last week, I could not help but notice we were three weeks from the Fourth of July but the crops woefully lagged in growth for meeting that old phrase ‘knee high on the Fourth of July’.
Other news around here today generally focuses on Virginia’ primary election results yesterday or the black bear wandering around the District of Columbia and Virginia suburbs. No, even in the insanity of the Capital Beltway news cycle, black bears wandering aimlessly around a well-manicured neighbourhood does stop one cold. How could this be? How often is this? Whaaatt?
In our hustle and bustle, I doubt we recognise that the fine line between human and animal contact is disappearing as the traditional habitats of the latters locations for homes to the formers. It’s a unbiquitous trend in this country and one with major implications as we see threats against both animals and humans increase with their increased proximities.
For fifteen yeras, we spent a fortnight annually in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts savouring the Tanglewood Music season. It was not unknown to hear stories about people needing to replace their rubbish bins because the random black bear (predominantly more aggressive grizzlies are generally out west, according to the tales) would walk down a road trying to empty all of the bins awaiting the pickup. Over the years, it went from ‘not unknown’ to an annual discussion.
One morning, we were driving between Lenox and Great Barrington in search of a cruel-free way to kill the mouse that had partaken of our beloved Berkshire Bakery bread (yes, I confess I had wrapped it up but not put it into a metal container. Silly me). Route 7 is a one lane road but everyone headed south came to a halt inexplicably north of Stockbridge. After a few minutes, I saw a black bear cub saunter across Route 7 into the woods. He had entertained everyone on the road so we all stopped. But, his willingness to do so on the outskirts of a decent-sized community is part and parcel of this conversation.
We have friends living a good twelve miles from the nearest town; their property is alive with bears, cats, foxes, and turkeys but these people never think much of it because of their well-honed dogs. Dogs deter everything and anything in those woods but not everyone had dogs. The longer we knew these people, the more aggressive they noted the visiting larger animals became. More importantly, houses continued pushing the outskirts of town as more New Yorkers and Bostonians with ample disposable income sought that second (or fourth) home in the cooler Berks.
We wealthy humans expland our habitats so bear now join foxes, wild cats, rodents and reptiles of various types, and many avian species in both fleeing us while thinking it worth checking out our homes (this doesn’t get into discussing various insects crossing paths with humans, either). The sheer growth of human population means that more people take up more space. Towns need more space to keep up with demand and both to supply food and waste facilities. Even these small towns, relatively speaking, in rural communities range into rural environs where animals continued relatively undisturbed until the last few decades. Where do the animals go?
Fully a decade ago, an erstwhile colleague sent me film of a wild bobcat exploring his backyard in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. My colleague grew up a big time hunter in central New York state (the buck’s head mounted in this office was a give away).
‘A bobcat?‘ I asked him sheepishly as he sent me the ‘cat’ video. I thought he lived near the state capital so how could a bobcat show up on his footage? Turns out my colleague’s property included bobcats for ages before it appeared on the door camera.
Additionally, many of the people moving to the edges of town are quite wealthy, feeling entitled to vast amounts of personal space which often puts new construction into spaces traditionally occupied solely by various species. Much of the time that goes pretty well but increasingly the overlap between humans and the more traditional inhabitants is accelerating with unbridled expectations on the part of the humans. People move in with small children and pets who want to be outside and may become fascinating for the larger animals unaccustomed to humans and our peculiar activities (from the animals’ views). Additionally, we don’t always dispose our food refuse safely and carefully as our priorities lie elsewhere. This high fat, docile (i.e., requires little work to catch) food becomes desirable to the bears, foxes, and others who begin seeing easier prey for their own needs. This often bleeds over into the animals expecting everything is theirs, resulting in attacks on anyone trying to prevent them from seizing leftovers or the animals outside. In short, neither side particularly considers, for perfectly understandable reasons, that the rules of engagement are changing.
It doesn’t take too long for Pavlovian behaviours to occur in the wild. I recall backpacking thirty-five years ago when we hung all our food at night not because of the bears as much as the more common marmot population of Wyoming, even in remote sections of the Wind River Range. A hiker going into the wild for a week generally isn’t thrilled by losing all his food the first night when the native animal has been exposed to human food at somehow, then sees each new hiker as a probable source of fast dining when the food is left too easily accessible for an eager critter.
This isn’t just happening along the Eastern seaboard. We fairly often hear today about attacks on joggers and hikers in semi-isolated parts of the Colorado Front Range or the western side of the Sierra Nevada as humans seek to escape other humans but only manage to become targets of interest for mountain lions or those western grizzlies. How many times have we seen stories, if not experienced them, of bears in the campgrounds of California, Wyoming, Utah, and Washington destroying seemingly safe food containers because the native animals now view human food as their own? That isn’t because the bears started eating off the take away menu; it’s because we are taking our lifestyle to them at an increased pace. I assume part of the reason that national parks may require reservations these days at some campgrounds is to control this phenomenon. Limiting people upfront, particularly those unaware or inexperienced, is better than killing animals after an unexpected attack on tourists.
In short, this is not a new problem yet it is a growing challenge because this vast country is not expanding as native populations of all types are expanding.
On the one hand, this seems merely a quaint story on the news but the implications are important like so many things. Not necessarily cosmic today but substantial down the line. The animals that exist in our world all play a part in the survival of the ecosystem. They all matter, directly or not, in the questions of global warming, ticks migrating into towns, and other changes in our lives that on the surface seem just curiosities. Evolution explains this is how life operates in our global ecosystem, even if most of us rarely ponder it. That doesn’t mean we should drop everything we are doing but I would encourage us not to ignore questions of what causes notable shifts in our environment. Humans are notably lax in inquisitiveness about why things happen if we even register things are happening. Much as the bear wandering down the major thoroughfares of D.C. and norther Virginia imply, perhaps we ought ask why and how this could affect us as it becomes even more pronounced.FIN