A bear enjoying a dumpster feast earlier this year in Eden, Vermont. Photo by S. Chambers, courtesy of Vermont Fish and Wildlife. As bear-human incidents continue at record rates, the state Fish and Wildlife Department is encountering public misperception that is leading Vermonters to avoid repo rting minor bear activity because they fear the bear will be killed. This often leads to “the worst possible catch-22 for the bears,” said Joshua Morse, public information officer for the department: the situation not being properly addressed until it has escalated much further — so much so that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to de-escalate things without considering killing the bear. “I wish people knew that what happens when you call us, 99% of the time, is that we give you advice on how to coexist with the bear,” Morse said. “That’s what we want to be doing and that is what mostly happens.” Vermont has a large population of around 7,000 black bears, about one for every 100 residents, that reside in all areas of the state except the Champlain Islands. The mammal’s sense of smell is 2,100 times better than a human’s and they have an excellent long-term memory, able to remember the location of food sources years after an initial visit. Black bears are “opportunistic omnivores” and will eat just about anything they find, especially during the spring and early summer when their highest-fat natural food sources (beechnuts and acorns) are not yet available and they continue to draw upon last year’s remaining fat reserves. These biological factors mean the long-lived animals can locate human-created food sources like birdseed or unsecured trash from far away and, once they get a taste, will return for years in hopes the feast has replenished itself. According to Jaclyn Comeau, the state’s black bear project leader and a wildlife biologist with the department, there have been a heightened number of bear-human incident reports for the past eight years, most of them minor. The department is on track to likely exceed 1,200 reports before the year is over, potentially hitting a new record, she said this month. Not only are there more bear-human incidents being reported, but Comeau said the department is seeing an increase in more intense types of interactions: around 50 reports of home entries and around 40 reports of vehicle entries per year, often the same bear entering multiple homes or vehicles. “If the department was able to intervene earlier, we believe it would help to reduce the number of more serious cases,” said David Sausville, wildlife management program manager with the department, in an email. “We would be able to help people before the issue elevated in concern.” In situations where a bear is habituated to enter residences or vehicles, killing the bear does become a safety consideration, though Comeau notes that not every bear that enters a home needs to be killed. An average of about 35 bears per year are put down by the department, she said. Comeau’s impression is that there are more severe bear reports happening and more bears needing to be killed: Six years ago, there were just a handful of home entry reports. “As best we can tell, it’s a learned, escalated behavior where they’ve had enough positive food rewards from communities,” she said. “For some bears, this switch happens where they just become so bold that they are willing to take that risk of going right into someone’s house to get more food.” While bears do need to be put down on a fairly regular basis, most of those cases do not make the news. Every so often, however, a highly visible case will occur, like last month in Stowe when a town police officer was authorized to shoot a bear after it repeatedly broke into a restaurant’s walk-in cooler. Each time a bear killing does make the news, the rumor about reporting minor bear incidents leading directly to a bear being put down “bubbles up,” Morse said. “It’s extremely frustrating. It’s this rumor with this really long life that pops up when you least need it,” he added. “It sounds really extreme, but it has real spreading power.” Morse himself fields the department’s general inquiry phone and email lines a few days a week, and on occasion gets calls from people who say, “I was really anxious to call you. Please don’t kill the bear.” “And I’ll say, ‘We’re so glad you called us. We’re not going to kill the bear,’” he recounted. “‘Our goal is to help you and the bear coexist, that’s what we want.’” When should you report a bear sighting? Vermonters should let the department know when they see bears in “places they probably shouldn’t be, or doing things they probably shouldn’t be doing,” Comeau said. The main way to do so is via Fish and Wildlife’s bear reporting form, though those needing immediate assistance for unsafe bear situations can call their local game warden. When a report is submitted, the department follows up with an email full of detailed information relevant to the specific situation or, in medium-intensity situations, with a phone call. In either situation, Comeau said, they will offer a site visit to help people locate and secure bear attractants. “Getting rid of bird feeders, putting up electric fences around chickens and finding a really good place to store your garbage can go a really long way,” the biologist said. “That’s the bulk of what we’re doing, and it proves to be most effective.” In a new partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, electric fences and electrified mats can be loaned out to Vermonters to help with bear situations for a few weeks until residents have a chance to purchase their own. Support staff help set up the equipment and get people comfortable with using it. In more severe cases, the department has tactics to make the bear have a negative experience at a site to outweigh the positive food experiences. They catch the bear and release it on site with loud noises and use a paintball gun or rubber ammunition. Those efforts are very time-intensive, Comeau said, and are saved for situations where people have made all the right changes to secure food sources. A bear exits a fenced but unsecured dumpster in Stowe on September 5, 2021. Photo by K. Fiegenbaum/VTDigger. Despite their great sense of smell, memory and drive to locate calories, bears can definitely unlearn the association between a locale and a feast, the biologist said. “It takes us being really diligent about it,” Comeau said. “We really have to make some of our own changes if we really want to see the light at the end of the tunnel for this situation.” In some cases, though, when bears are consistently entering homes, businesses or vehicles, or acting aggressively and not responding to changed human behavior, they do need to be put down. Relocation is not an effective option, she said. Bears have an “amazing ability to navigate” and will eventually return to their original location, as well as likely causing problems for the humans or other bears living where they are relocated to. “The public really likes that idea and I understand why they do, because it seems like the nicest thing to do,” Comeau said. “But I honestly feel like it is the most selfish way to handle this.” ‘We need people to step it up’ As the frequency and intensity of bear incident reports have increased, the department has amped up their bear coexistence outreach, Morse said, from workshops to social media and television ads to poster campaigns in conflict towns. Ten years ago, Morse said, the department wasn’t spending any marketing funds on bear coexistence. Despite their best efforts, he said, the department seems to have “hit a wall” with the number of people they can reach and educate about bear coexistence, especially in places with chronic issues such as Stowe, Killington, the Mad River Valley and the Wilmington and Dover area. “We are using every tool and every channel to try to give people the means to coexist with bears, and we need people to step it up,” Morse said. “We need whole communities to be doing the information sharing and making the changes in lockstep,” he added. “Otherwise, it will just be whack-a-mole, and that’s not the scale of change that we need for the bears.” To that end, the department is supporting a peer-to-peer nonprofit, Vermont Coverts, that helps residents educate their neighbors on what to do with bears using their own social networks or word of mouth. They also support grassroots community groups like the Mad River Valley Bear Initiative, as well as encourage towns to think about adopting ordinances to keep garbage contained. Working to help Vermonters coexist with bears is a significant and overwhelming drain on the department, Morse said, even with the new partnership with the USDA. While all the outreach and education they do is to help make living with bears easier, the department is also discussing concerns that there are too many bears in the state. “We are trying to help people expand their comfort level a bit, but we are also talking about making some changes to bring the population down a little bit lower to see if that will also help alleviate some of the pressure we’re all feeling,” Comeau said. The best and really only way to do that is by increasing the number of bears killed in hunting season, a policy conversation the Fish and Wildlife commissioner’s office is currently having, she said. To that end, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Board announced Wednesday that it will be holding public hearings at the end of August on proposed changes to the state’s bear hunting regulations. Currently, hunters can take one bear per year. The proposed changes would allow a second bear permit to be purchased for specific areas of the state, as well as slightly extend the bear hunting season. Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘The worst possible catch-22’: Fish and Wildlife struggles to combat bear rumors. ...read more read less