When Bears Come Calling

Very early one morning, Georgeann Hall woke her grown daughter in the adjacent bedroom of their weekend cabin in Wisconsin. She had just seen a black bear in the kitchen. Her daughter said she must have been dreaming. And Hall agreed, until she caught a glimpse of the bear opening the refrigerator and helping itself to the Log Cabin syrup.

“We call it the Gourmet Bear,” Hall tells me during a recent phone call. The two women barricaded themselves inside her bedroom. “Then we had to come up with a plan. We needed to call for help.” The phone, however, was in the kitchen with the 900-pound bear. They crawled out the bedroom window and escaped to their car. Luckily, the keys were in the ignition. After driving to the nearest payphone, they called the police. Officer Mark Pope followed them back to their cabin. He fired his hunting rifle and scared the bear away.

What attracted the bear to their cabin in the first place? Quite simply, the scent of food in the form of freshly baked cookies from the previous evening. “It was one of those perfect nights,” Hall says, “and so we left the windows and the door to the screened porch open.” The bear pried the screen off the doorframe and was rewarded with fresh cookies and other treats. Not a bad payoff.

Renowned black bear expert Eric Wenum, biologist for Montana’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks, works in an area bordering Glacier National Park. It’s a region containing one of the highest black bear densities in the nation. “It’s about a bear per square mile,” he tells me from his office in Kalispel. On average, Wenum will receive 1,300 complaints a year about bears or bear damage. Wenum explains, “As prime bear habitat becomes increasingly settled by humans, we’re bringing all kinds of things with us: trash, bird feeders, pet food, greasy BBQ’s. Once they’ve associated food with houses, they’re likely to return. It works very much like a reward system.”

Wenum continues, “If you have a neighbor who intentionally feeds deer, or leaves pet food out, a lot of times what happens is you create a neighborhood problem. Bears don’t necessarily differentiate between one house and another. They learn that houses in general have food. But they may end up at one that doesn’t have any. If he can’t find the food, he might escalate his behavior and start testing doors and windows.” Though a homeowner may be doing everything right by eliminating bear attractants on their property, they can still pay the cost for a neighbor’s mistake.

Laws regarding bear relocation or destruction vary from state to state, and sometimes from county to county. Most agencies will kill or move a bear only as a last resort. Wenum is one of the few who uses Karelian bear dogs to deter bears from returning. The dogs will tree the bears or scare them away with their barking. But trying to modify a bear’s behavior is difficult. It’s better if humans don’t provide food sources in the first place.

When Hall and her daughter finally returned to bed that morning, another surprise awaited them. A perfect bear print was on the wall just outside their bedrooms. Their close call had been even closer than they thought. The bear never returned, but Georgeann says that before going to bed at night, “We close all the windows and doors.”