The NYT reports on an apparent increase in human-bear encounters in the western U.S.
Bears — dangerous and unpredictable always — are prowling broader areas of the West in closer contact with people than ever. In some places, drought is driving the animals out of their wilder haunts and into human settlements. Longer-term climate change, scientists say, is also disrupting bear foraging patterns, especially in and around Yellowstone National Park, where grizzlies have been compelled to search more widely for food in recent years as a tree that produces pine nuts crucial to their diets has been decimated. . . .
The intensified level of conflict is also spurring new research that is challenging some long-held assumptions about bears, notably the idea that bear population is the key variable. As solitary and often nocturnal creatures — unlike, say, elk, which herd together and can be easily counted — bear numbers are guesses at best, scientists say, especially for poorly studied species like the black bear. And shifting patterns of bear behavior, they say, like bears’ learning new feeding habits, could be even more important than population trends. . . .
Human nature is often just as important as bear nature when the two species meet, wildlife managers say, and sometimes people make things worse by failing to see past the bumptious, innocent image that bears can sometimes project. Last month, for example, two people were seen buying cheeseburgers and hand-feeding them to bears near a Burger King in western Colorado. State wildlife officials said that act endangered both local residents and the bears, by cementing a message to the animals that people are a food source.
But with more people living or playing in closer proximity to public lands and national forests that are the bears’ domain, the line between dangerous rogue bear behavior and natural wild behavior that just happens to be in a human backyard can get blurred.