Spoil the Picnicking, but Spare the Bear

The little black bear showed up at the shady Switzer Picnic Area in the Angeles National Forest two weeks ago, and immediately started looking for friends.

When families sat down for barbecues at the picnic tables, the 18-month-old cub would lumber toward them, sniffing for food.

It helped itself to pieces of hamburgers and potato chips left behind on tables and rummaged around in the trash bin. It stared, seemingly amused, at people who tried to scare it off with shouts.

“This one bear was getting, oh, very friendly with people,” said Marty Dumpis, acting district ranger for the area, who refused to give the male cub a name for fear of only increasing its popularity with visitors. “When they get to that point, they’re losing fear of people.”

In the past, the presence of a bear threatening people could prompt rangers to bring in state Department of Fish and Game officials to shoot tranquilizer darts -- or in extreme cases, real bullets -- at wandering creatures.

But this time, the rangers decided to try something different, because the cub did not appear to be threatening people. They gated off the road to the picnic site northeast of La Canada Flintridge, preventing visitors -- many of whom bring large quantities of food -- from driving in.

“We were trying to think outside the box,” said forest spokeswoman Sherry Rollman. “We were thinking, if we could just curtail that, the bear can just return to the wild.”

Wildlife managers are hoping the cub -- which they believe had just been kicked out of its mother’s den -- has figured out that there is no more food and has gone back into the mountains on its own.

Rangers expected to see fewer bears coming down from the mountains than normal this year, because recent rains have created a buffet of tender plants for the animals to eat. So when the cub was reported, Dumpis sent a colleague to check it out.

The employee spotted the bear and the garbage that it had strewn about. He yelled, “Stay away, bear,” and clapped, but the cub wasn’t fazed.

Dumpis then decided to close the campground before the arrival of the weekend, when the site gets most crowded. Hikers, however, were still allowed to walk through.

The effort appears to have worked: Dumpis said he had received only one more report of a bear sighting, and that was a week ago. The closure is slated to last one more week.

This is not the first time the forest has gated off an area to separate a bear from people. Officials took the same tack last year when a black bear mauled a man who was trying to defend his cooler: They closed the campground in the Clear Creek-Chilao area.

In the last few years, Fish and Game has been working on “more palatable solutions” for dealing with bears than simply tranquilizing them or killing them, said spokesman Steve Martarano. “We’ve definitely tightened up our policy,” he said, in determining “what is a problem bear, when we try to tranquilize it and get it out.”

Bear observers said they weren’t surprised that a cub on its own would home in on a sloppy picnic area.

“Bears want an easy food source, so they don’t want to expend a lot of energy to get food,” said Don Richardson, who is taking care of three black bears at Moonridge Animal Park, a zoological sanctuary in Big Bear.

Bears mostly dine on grasses and then have to pounce on the occasional rodent or fish. This bear was probably pleased that it didn’t have to hunt very hard to find a good meal, especially one as high in fat as human meals are, Richardson said.

Though he is glad that the bear seems to have wandered off, he worries that it might have picked up a bad habit.

“It sounds discouraging that the rangers tried to scare him off and he didn’t go,” he said. “The next step is to elevate the amount you try to scare him.”

Other wildlife managers have used firecrackers, rubber bullets and even special dogs from Germany, he said.

But some of these more extreme procedures can accidentally kill the bear.

Last summer, Fish and Game officials received a report of a bear being fed on the shore of Pyramid Lake, northwest of Los Angeles, and an officer dispatched to the scene saw a visitor giving an 18-month-old cub a hot dog. Officials tried to scare the animal away, even chasing it with a police helicopter, but it kept coming back.

“We were hazing it away with what’s called bean-bag rounds,” said Marty Wall, who supervises the state’s game wardens in the area. The soft bags are designed for people and are not supposed to inflict serious injury, but one of the rounds hit the bear in a vulnerable spot in the abdomen. “This caused an injury that we thought would be life-threatening, and then we euthanized it.”

He hopes that preventing human interaction with the new cub at Switzer’s will avert that risk.

“The younger they are, the better chances they have for adjusting,” he said. This bear “is an adolescent, and he’s just learning how to get food, what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of.”

On Wednesday afternoon, there were paper signs posted at the picnic ground’s shut gate that warned, “Switzer’s Area is closed to all entry due to aggressive bear activity,” and red and white signs that said “Stop, No Entry.” No one was sitting at the wooden picnic tables, though a few cans of Pepsi and some candy wrappers were scattered over the leaf-strewn ground.

Gary Bates, 27, who was digging holes for the wooden posts that hold up power lines in the area, said he didn’t need a warning.

“You don’t bother them and they don’t bother you,” he said.