Bears keep showing up in unlikely places

(Editor's note: This story was first published on www.greatnorthernoutdoors.net in 2009; we're re-running it due to recent bear sightings in Traverse City and near Ann Arbor.)

MADISON, Wis. -- Most days, Noah Balgooyen is the guy who answers the phone when a Wisconsin resident calls the Department of Natural Resources with a wildlife question.

Wild pigs are eating the crops (they certainly are, especially in southwestern Wisconsin's Crawford County). There's a wolf in my yard (it's usually a coyote). I saw a strange small black panther/large rodent looking thingy (that's a fisher, a member of the weasel family, native to the north woods).

But in Wisconsin, the critter that sends the most people scrambling for the phone is the black bear. They know what they're seeing. They're calling because of WHERE they see them.

"We've been receiving calls from people in counties that generally don't have bears," Balgooyen said. "They're afraid. They haven't seen them before and they don't know how to react."

Bear sightings have become increasingly common in more suburban and agricultural areas across the Great Lakes. In the past several years road-killed bears have been reported in Toledo, Ohio and Flint, Michigan; in 2008 a police officer shot one in southern Michigan's Battle Creek. Similar stories have come from the southern parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ontario and even Iowa.

There's little question the large, omnivorous mammals are spreading out from the north woods and into more populous areas to the south. Experts say bear numbers are on the rise across their range, and as the critters move to the suburbs and farms, they're finding plenty to eat. And as long as there's food, the bears won't be turning back.

"Bear used to be a symbol of wilderness," said Michigan Department of Natural Resources biologist Dwayne Etter. "What we're finding out is that bears do very well in people's back yards as long as they're tolerated by people."

Bear numbers have doubled in Michigan, according to Etter. Wisconsin game managers say bear numbers there have tripled, and in Minnesota the number of bears has more than quadrupled from fewer than 6,000 bears in the mid-1960s to more than 24,000 today.

"This is good news," said Keith Warnke, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources deer and bear ecologist. "It means we have a healthy bear population, and we may be able to expand bear hunting opportunity. The other good news is that more people will have opportunities to see these great animals in the wild."

The increases have come in large part because of education and bear management practices that include hunting. As recently as the 1960s bounties still existed for black bears, which meant the animals were shot on sight. That mindset was a vestige of North America's early settlement by Europeans, according to Lynn Rogers, a Ph.D. who has studied bears in Minnesota since the 1960s.

"They were worried about survival, and anything that appeared to be a threat to their lives or livestock, they just blasted away at," he said.

Part of the problem was also the way outdoor magazines portrayed bears as "slant-eyed demons with a mind on mayhem," Rogers said. Stoked by fear, people in bear country used poison, trapping and gut shooting to keep the animals at bay.

"People don't want to live with animals they fear," Rogers said.

Rogers thought bears deserved better. Working with hunting groups and the Minnesota legislature, he helped write the regulations that turned bears into a big-game species in 1971. Establishing a hunting season accomplished two things, Rogers said.

"One one hand it gave the bears value, and on the other hand it protected them for 10 ½ months a year."

Some of the fear of bears still exists, and human-bear conflicts often mean bad news for the bears, according to Linda Olver, an assistant bear ecologist with the Wisconsin DNR.

"People are generally concerned about their safety," she said, citing a case in Iowa where a farmer shot a bear. "We have moved a good way, but there's still a segment of the population that has that fear. They don't realize that bears are motivated by food, and if you take that food away often the bears will leave."

Since bounties were lifted, bear numbers have grown steadily across North America. In January, the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board voted to increase the number of bear-hunting permits by 57 percent to 7,310. Last year New York expanded the number of counties in which bears can be hunted. Early this year Kentucky added a two-day bear hunt designed to reduce human-bear conflicts. New Jersey's growing bear population has prompted and politically-charged, on-again off-again bear hunting season. Etters said bears are probably established in southern Michigan's Jackson County, and others have been documented in Hillsdale and Lenawee counties, which border Indiana. And based on the food supply, there's no reason to think they're going away any time soon.

"They've got good natural food available, and also a good mixture of human foods available to them," said Etter, whose agency is in the midst of a two-year re-evaluation of its bear management practices. "Orchards, garbage, man-made sources of food. Lots of people plant food plots, so a lot of that is part of the reason here in Michigan."

The movement to establish green space in cities has also contributed to the movement of bears. As more cities work to connect with the countryside through walking paths and river corridors, they're creating perfect corridors for bears and other creatures to move around.

"We always try to link (cities) out into the broader wild spaces to people can get that feeling of being away from it all," said Linda Wall, the director of Ontario's Bear Wise program. "But we create habitat, and when you create habitat, animals move into it."

States and provinces are leaning heavily on education of humans to reduce conflicts with bears. Ontario started Bear Wise after a 2003 study showed that most human-bear conflicts have everything to do with food. Bears are smart enough to know an easy meal when they see it, and when they equate humans with food, trouble usually follows.

Bear Wise seeks, above all, to teach people how not to attract bears, an issue made more pressing not only as bears move toward people, but as people move toward the bears. Ontario has some 100,000 bears, and even the ones that stay in the north country are closer to people.

"With all the Tim Horton's and Wendy's popping up in northern towns, we do tend to draw bears in when natural food fails," Wall said. Some bears have even been shown to hit town only on trash day, she said.

Bear Wise teaches people how to manage food sources so they don't attract bears, provides funding for communities to bear-proof sites like city dumps, and encourages cities to pass ordinances that make them less attractive to bears, such as requiring that people put trash out on the morning of collection. Bear Wise also gives people a chance to report bear interactions, and responds with site visits to determine how to remove whatever is attracting the bears.

"Bears can't waste time where there aren't rewards," Wall said.

States are taking up efforts like Bear Wise as well. Olver said Wisconsin passes out literature at its state parks to teach people proper bear-country etiquette. Etter said the Michigan DNR is trying to work with local police departments and animal control officers to develop procedures for handling bears when they show up.

"We'd like to work with these other agencies so that it turns out good for the bears and for the public."