All Us Goldilocks and California Black Bears

This drought year, their natural food resources sharply curtailed, California black bears are taking chances they never would before. In the Sierra Nevada national parks--Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia--young bears, lacking both fat reserves and geographic experience to help them search for food, brave human beings to filch what they can in the campgrounds.

Biologists expect that some bears will starve, just as they have in droughts past, but bear populations will persevere and recover as they always have.

Preserving wildness--a National Park Service commitment--means preserving not individuals but rather ecosystem elements and processes. Bears and death are part of that whole. The parks, however, are only islands in a larger landscape where rules for bears and people are not consistent.

California’s state symbol, the grizzly bear, was extirpated in the state more than 60 years ago. But its milder-mannered kin, the black bear, has persevered from the northern Coast Range to forest patches of the Southern California mountains. Outside the national parks, black bears are a game species. They are legally hunted--and poached--to supply Asia with gall bladders for potions and feet for soup, as well to supply the more mundane Western demand for hides and claws.

Were hunting and poaching the only human assaults, prospects for California bears would be fine. But the habitat that best supports them, the zone where oaks and pines come together along the western slope of the Sierra, has become a hot spot of recreation, housing, intensive forestry and grazing. In many places the habitat bears require persists, albeit in fractured form: moist meadows, berry patches, oaks to supply acorns, rotting logs for grubbing insects and old, standing dead trees to supply hollows for winter dens. What places black bears in jeopardy outside the parks, and confounds park management within, is that most notable of ursine characteristics--to exploit whatever food resource lies within reach.

Black bears are highly intelligent. In the never-ending struggle for food between campers and bears, no attempt to outwit bears has succeeded for long. Park bears have learned to follow tie-lines to food hanging in trees, hidden under boulders and even secured in bags underwater. Food in view, in an automobile or a picnic cooler, is pure opportunity.

Bears are also powerful. The typical 200-to-300-pound animal has the muscles--and the persistence--to break three-foot branches supporting food sacks, to pry the tops off metal coolers, to rip down car doors and to tear siding off cabins with tough, curved claws. Despite their size, bears are quick--considerably faster than people in a sprint. And bears climb trees.

Victims of bear vandalism often ask why bears don’t stick to their own foods. The answer is that the bear has evolved to exploit widely separated but highly nutritious foodstuffs. Although they are taxonomic carnivores, bears mostly subsist on vegetarian diets and frequent a world where protein is usually in scarce supply. Bears spend much of their time exploring for new berry patches, new acorn falls, logs riddled with ants or termites and the occasional hidden deer fawn. These patches tend to be far apart and unreliable; bears use their intelligence and much of their energy searching for food.

Enter the garbage can, predictably containing ample supplies of protein, fats, and carbohydrates--maybe even multivitamins. Garbage cans, campgrounds, unprotected tents and cabins, cars containing a week’s supply of food--all are rich food patches. Weighing his benefits and costs, the park bear learns: If he can’t succeed through stealth, people banging pots are largely impotent anyway.

Bears that successfully exploit human food resources grow larger, reach maturity sooner and produce more offspring. The question bear biologists like to ask one another is why black bears don’t kill and consume human beings more often. People are easy to catch and kill; they’re loaded with protein and fat. Yet such events have rarely happened. There is no record of anyone having been killed by a black bear in California. The only plausible explanation is that bears recognize human beings to be dangerous adversaries. And, in fact, marauding bears outside the protective boundaries of national parks generally do not survive long. Unlike their bold park brethren, most black bears are profoundly shy, rarely permitting themselves to be observed.

In Kings Canyon, Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, more than a decade of human/bear management programs have radically altered the nature and quantity of encounters between the two species. With a primary goal of preserving wild and natural bear populations, the parks have concentrated on segregating human food from bears. That has meant strict enforcement of no-feeding regulations, bear-proof garbage cans, bear-proof food lockers in drive-in campgrounds and heavy investment in education--literature, signs and on-site contact.

It has paid off. Injuries are a rarity; property damage incidents are down to a fraction of what they were in the 1970s. Bears are smaller, less fertile and somewhat less numerous, having had to adjust to natural food supplies. Fewer bears are drawn into developments; those few that do become habituated are eventually destroyed, although sometimes translocation to distant sites within the park is still attempted. Some older visitors nostalgically recall bears congregating at the dumps or cruising boldly through the campgrounds, but generally the public appears to support maintaining a wild and natural population. The park service has learned that its most effective message is: “A fed bear is a dead bear.”

Until recently, the Sierran parks counseled visitors never to confront a bear. This looks like good, conservative logic. But where there are potential food rewards, bears continue to test human dominance. If a foray into a campsite produces fleeing people and an abandoned dinner, a bear learns this is a fine ploy. And if, the next time, some brave soul fails to flee, the bear may try sound effects or a charge--sheer bluffery but guaranteed to terrify most campers. The learning curve for bears in these circumstances is astoundingly rapid, leading in short order to a fearless and potentially dangerous animal that must be destroyed. Human assertiveness, on the other hand--yelling, threatening gestures, throwing missiles, perhaps a human bluff charge--applied when first a bear tries his paw at human food, produces ursine timidity and reduces the likelihood that individual will try again. The park service is encouraging visitors to take a more aggressive stance.

This logic is easy for a biologist. Telling folks on vacation from Los Angeles to play tough with bears is a complex job. As restrained as they generally are, there are occasional individual bears who may contest human hegemony. And almost any animal will strike back if assaulted at such close range that it fears to turn its back. Moreover, there is a streak of cruelty among some people who delight in an invitation to throw rocks or swing a branch. Among animals, dominance is asserted with minimum force; such is not always the case with people. Rangers try to explain all this and more: Make sure bears have an escape route; avoid mothers and their cubs; stage a tactical retreat once a bear has physical possession of your food--and clean up any mess.

In decades past, people visiting the national parks took their chances with bears and often lost. But beginning in the 1970s, the National Park Service found itself at the wrong end of lawsuits over property damage or personal injury. Although it has rarely lost, the service faces a dilemma: Advising visitors to retreat meekly in the face of bears leads in the long run to more problem bears, more property damage, more animals destroyed--but reduces physical risk for the immediate human players. Advising urbanites to attempt the subtle art of displaying dominance with large carnivores will succeed far more often than it fails, reducing risks to humans and bears alike--but it’s not foolproof.

Although forever obliged to walk the tightrope between protecting park resources for future generations and providing for present enjoyment, the National Park Service has made some real progress in confronting this notably charismatic--and nettlesome--beast.