Bearly a Problem

By Becky Nelson
Bramlblings
Several years ago, local media outlets were abuzz with stories about bears. Bears with cubs in Amherst were a sensation for weeks on a social media site an on a New Hampshire television station. The “Hanover bears” were all over the news, plugging up both social media and traditional media outlets. If my own social media feed and our own experiences are any indication, Newport will be in the Bear News any minute now.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an excited call and a video from the clerk at my store with bear news. A friend had dropped by and called her from the car warning her not to come out of the store because a bear was beside the building. It is not the first time we have had reports of bears near the store, with several customers reporting they had seen a bear cross the road near the store.

Just a week ago, my daughter and her family had stopped on our dirt road to watch a bear snacking on something in the wooded area just beyond the stone wall. It wasn’t phased by the family chattering and pointing, nor even when they yelled at it to move along. This is a bold bear.

Just yesterday, I got an early morning call from my niece who lives on the road. She has a couple of pot bellied pig pets that live outside the house. She had just fed the little piggies and gone back to the house when movement caught her eye. There was the bear…or a bear…wagging its tail like a puppy outside the pigpen, about to go in to take a mouthful of the pig food…or a pig. She went back out and yelled at it, to no avail. It only left the yard when she banged on a metal pot with a metal spoon and it headed for the woods behind the raspberry patch here at the farm.

The bears are fun to watch…from a distance…and they seem to be enjoying a population explosion around here. Unlike a domestic animal that we control and can keep away from our crops, our homes, our gardens, our landscaping, our pets and our families, bears can create hazards and dangers that we cannot control if unchecked. In the Hanover bear debate, there was a tremendous outcry when it was announced that the bears were going to be euthanized. Posts and quotes I heard and read about the subject ranged from mild disagreement to rants and anger. But sometimes, perhaps not in this situation, but sometimes it is necessary to euthanize a problem critter before it becomes a bigger problem and hurts someone. I am very concerned about our neighborhood bear as it seems to be very bold. A large, rotting stump that has been in our back yard about twenty feet from our bedroom window was recently ripped apart, I think by the bear looking for grubs. He is much too close for comfort, and I think I will make a call to Fish and Game to report his visits before someone gets hurt or property is destroyed.

Bears are really, really smart critters. They grub in the dirt for bugs, eat dead animals they find about, eat berries and nuts and grasses and all manner of things in their omnivorous existence. It’s hard to find food sometimes, especially in the early spring before other creatures and bugs brave the cold and before berries and nuts are produced, so hungry bear will go wherever it can to find food. And they are opportunistic. If a free meal is left lying about, they will certainly visit the “restaurant” frequently.

As in Hanover, with bird seed in supply at home feeders and waste food in dumpsters, the bears were in heaven. Easy food, ripe for the picking. Folks decry the bears being killed, but from what I have read, once a bear is a visitor to these sites, it will come back again and again and again. That’s why I am so very concerned about our new neighbor. The more they return unchecked, the more bold they become. Bears who enter houses and even back yards and downtowns are dangerous big animals and they have very big claws and teeth. They can do a number on a human who threatens it or makes it uncomfortable by getting too close, which makes the cohabitation of bears and people a recipe for disaster.

Some folks feel we should let the bears do whatever they want…that we have encroached on their habitat and we somehow owe them their free roam. Yes, we humans have encroached on wild habitat and developed once wild areas. But there is no going back. We cannot shut down towns or require citizens to endure the threat of large, wild creatures breaking into their homes or camping out in their back yards, and we surely cannot stop farming to feed ourselves. Bold bears are not an acceptable part of either equation in my book.

Bears are always a threat here at the farm. We seem to have a healthy population of them year to year, and are thankful for the hunters who annually thin the population a little bit. They have raided bird feeders on occasion in the neighborhood, some even coming up onto neighbor’s decks. They are not beyond snagging a chicken, either, if the opportunity arises and they are trying to get to the chicken feed. But what really keeps us anxious are the corn, raspberry and blueberry crops. They love these treats as much as we do, and can decimate a crop in a single night. Electric fences deter them pretty well, but it is impossible to electrify fences in some areas of the farm.

The best solution overall is to be proactive to prevent bears from coming in the first place. Stop feeding birds in early April when bears come out of hibernation. Put fencing around vulnerable crops or gardens. Lock your dumpster if in territory where bears have been seen. Don’t leave food items anywhere a bear can sniff it out…or they will come looking. We aren’t about to eradicate bears, so we had better be ready to live with them around us. Be smart and be bear-aware. You aren’t immune to their visits, even if you live in town, but you can take some easy precautions to try to deter their visits. Visit the NH Fish and Game website for more tips on living with bears. I will keep you posted if Yogi becomes more of a problem here at the farm.

— You can reach Becky Nelson at [email protected].