There’s Trouble Bruin : Vancouver’s Hillside Communities Face a Growing Problem With Roving Bears, but Even Relocation Programs Don’t Have Worried Residents Out of the Woods

The streets are strangely quiet. But then most residents of this hockey-crazed city are indoors, watching the Vancouver Canucks try to gain ground against the New York Rangers in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals.

On Millstream Lane, high above town, a lone jogger is chugging along under a lingering Vancouver twilight. Brian Mills, 50, a longtime resident in the affluent British Properties neighborhood of West Vancouver, is still a fair distance from home, but he plans to make it well before nightfall--and before the start of the second period.

“I don’t jog anymore at night,” Mills says, taking a breather.

Nor do many others in West Vancouver. Or in the nearby North Vancouver District. Black bears have awakened from hibernation and until next fall, the two hillside communities, collectively referred to as the North Shore, will be among the haunts of the large and potentially dangerous animals.

Children won’t be allowed out alone at night. Dogs and cats won’t be safe. Garbage cans will be particularly vulnerable.

And urban Southern California thinks it has wild animal problems?

These neighborhoods, as well as a few others backed up against the dense British Columbia wilderness, have gone to the animals.

Black bears--and to a lesser extent cougars--are taxing not only the nerves of residents but employees of the British Ministry of Environment, Land and Parks, who are operating on a limited budget and are under extreme pressure to relocate, rather than destroy, problem bears whenever possible.

In 1992, the last year for which figures are available, there were nearly 400 complaints of black bears in neighborhoods from residents of the North Shore and the nearby communities in the Coquitlam and Port Moody areas. Thirty-five bears were destroyed, 27 relocated.

There were more than 700 complaints in Region II, which includes Vancouver and several surrounding cities.

Cougar sightings are not as common, because they move in and out of the neighborhoods like phantoms in the night.

But they have been known to chase children on bicycles in daylight, to maul one on occasion. And they have used their stealth to take many a family pet.

“The cougars have basically denuded this area of cats and dogs,” Mills says.

“One of my neighbors across the street . . . there was an infant sitting next to a cat, and this cougar came out of the bush and took the cat. It could have just as easily taken the kid.”

Dennis Pemble, an animal control specialist with BC Environment, tracks problem bears and cougars on such a regular basis that he drives around with hounds in his truck, taking calls on his cellular telephone. Pemble is on call 24 hours a day.

He says in one instance a woman was walking with a small dog, and when she stopped and reached down to pet the animal, “The cougar brushed her hand away and took the dog.”

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Vancouver’s problem is similar to Southern California’s in one respect: the inroads being made by civilization into the wilderness. Greater Vancouver’s population is growing by about 35,000 annually.

But what is unique about Vancouver’s situation, particularly at the North Shore and around Coquitlam and Port Moody, is that the wilderness above the houses is mostly protected watersheds, which provide the city with water--and the bears and cougars and other wild animals with ideal habitat free of hunters and campers. Several creeks and a few trails give the animals easy access to paved streets.

“The development areas are really true wilderness areas that are not used by humans (although there are some hiking trails and a regulated logging effort),” said Bob Forbes, a wildlife biologist with BC Environment. “That allows the wildlife to infiltrate, for want of a better term, right into the urban areas. They just come right through the whole system. So we have high numbers of human contacts in these areas.”

Mills has lived in the British Properties neighborhood for 20 years but only recently moved to the top street, where he enjoys a spectacular view of the city and the waterways that surround Vancouver.

Last summer, a bear trampled his vegetable garden and tore apart a large plastic compost maker in his back yard, he said, adding: “The year before that, my oldest boy (now 13) went out for the newspaper. It was a bright and sunny morning, about 11 a.m., but there was this big old bear ambling down the middle of the road.

“Another time, last spring, I was hiking in (nearby) Capilano Regional Park, and when I headed back, there were bear scats on my trail. I don’t know if he was following me or what.”

Wetzel Mayr, 69, a resident in the North Vancouver District, says she has not seen a bear in 31 years here. “But I’ve heard of them taking swims in people’s pools,” she says.

Pemble says bears have entered garages, broken windows of cars and homes, and in some instances entered the homes themselves.

“One time a woman opened her front door, walked outside and saw a mother bear and a cub in her front yard,” Pemble says. “She went back inside and closed the door, and there was the second cub on her counter eating an apple.”

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Black bears are shy by nature, and there have been few attacks in Greater Vancouver. There are no estimates of the number of bears around the city, but their populations are considered healthy. And at the rate at which humans are invading their territory, BC Environment says it is concerned about the potential for danger.

“Bears are a bona fide threat to public safety,” Forbes says, adding that the animals, which range in size from 150 to more than 400 pounds, may be shy but they are very strong. They don’t like being surprised, and they become agitated when someone tries to take something they want.

In the last three years, the complaints about black bears have so deluged BC Environment offices during spring and summer that officials have had to decide which calls to investigate. “If it’s a bear that’s just walking through a back yard, it’s not an issue,” Forbes says. “If it’s a bear that returns to somebody’s property two or three times or a bear that’s just hanging around, we do one of two things: The bear is either captured and moved, or destroyed.”

But tagging and moving the bears is expensive and time-consuming, and the ones that are moved--to distances up to 80 miles--seem to be showing up in the same neighborhood or similar ones at an increasing rate.

“We’re just playing musical bears,” says Jim Rissling, a BC Environment senior conservation officer based in Chilliwack.

The percentage of bears showing up somewhere else after being moved was 8% in 1992. Rissling says that when numbers are tabulated for 1993 and ‘94, “I think you’ll see a much higher average.”

Some wildlife experts say there’s a simpler solution: Kill more bears.

“It used to be we’d have a really bad year and we’d go and destroy a lot of bears,” Rissling says. “I remember when we’d have 3,500 complaints in this region and we went out and destroyed 350-something bears. That would reduce the population and it would take five or six years for the population to gradually build up, and then we would destroy a bunch more.”

But these days such logic doesn’t work, as the Azusa Police Department learned when it used shotguns to gun down a black bear in that San Gabriel Mountains foothill community last month.

Pemble says: “If we wanted to cut back on the problem, we could thin out the bear population. But the public does not want that, nor will it let us do it.”

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Mills has finished jogging, and darkness is falling in Vancouver. Pemble has set traps to try to capture the mother of two bear cubs caught the previous day near a logging camp about 10 miles away. The mother will be captured by morning, as will a large male that wanders into one of the traps. All four bears will be ear-tagged and moved to another stretch of wilderness about 80 miles away.

It could be only a matter of time before any of them show up in somebody else’s neighborhood, or even back at the North Shore.

Down the road from Mills’ house, at the end of Pinecrest Drive, lots have been carved into a stand of trees that were once home to bears, cougars and other animals. The exclusive estates, behind a guarded gate, will sell for millions. The view of the city will be breathtaking. But the residents will have to watch their backs.