GROWING PAINS - As their numbers multiply in some states, black bears are creating unusual problems in some unlikely places

National Wildlife, Oct-Nov, 2001 by Les Line

Patrick Carr, black bear project leader with the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, seemed a bit frazzled. It was only mid-February and already his phone was lighting up with bear complaints, including calls from startled exurban residents who discovered that bruins had been hibernating in the crawl spaces under their homes, which, in some cases, were in areas that once provided habitat for bears. Due to heavy demand, Carr was planning an extra workshop to train local police officers in handling so-called "nuisance" bears, with an emphasis on using lethal force. "Dead bears don't breed," Carr told a writer, explaining that "an aggressive approach" is needed to protect the Garden State's sprawling human population from a booming ursine population.

Around the same time, and in sharp contrast, the Arizona Game and Fish Department was giving royal treatment to 18 black bear cubs that wandered into Phoenix last fall in a desperate search for food. One animal was rescued from the top of a palm tree with a fire truck cherry-picker. Biologist Pat O'Brien says the starving bears were fattened up at a wildlife rehabilitation center and were being moved by helicopter to mountaintop dens where they could sleep away the rest of the winter.

Meanwhile, a U.S. magistrate in New Orleans was coming down hard on a hapless sportsman who shot a Louisiana black bear, a federally listed threatened subspecies. The judge yanked the man's hunting privileges for three years and ordered him to pay a $2,500 fine plus $9,000 restitution, and contribute $500 to the Black Bear Conservation Committee, a nonprofit group working to restore bear populations in the lower Mississippi River Valley through translocations and habitat improvement on both public and private lands.

And with lean black bears about to emerge from their dens, the town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, was enforcing an ordinance that mandates bear- proof garbage containers for homes and restaurants along the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The rule had been debated since 1997 when the acorn crop crashed, driving scores of bears into town, but it wasn't adopted until a bear killed a woman hiker on a park trail in May 2000.

Too many bears. Bears in the wrong places. Not enough bears. The first- ever fatal attack by a black bear in a national park in the United States. What in the world is going on with Ursus americanus, the all- American bear?

What's going on is an increase in black bear numbers in many areas of the lower 48 states over the past 30-odd years. In Minnesota, for example, the bear population has soared from 6,000 to 30,000. That's generally not a big problem until bears and people compete for the same sylvan territory, such as in New Jersey, the most densely populated state. As a result, a new term has worked its way into the bear manager's glossary: cultural carrying capacity, meaning the number of burly omnivores that society will tolerate.

Usually, when conflicts occur, bears are just being bears--big critters with big appetites that will eat anything handy, especially in spring when natural foods are scarce. They may knock down bird feeders, swipe burgers off the barbecue grill and slurp up rotting leftovers in the compost bin. Last fall, a female and two cubs broke into a kitchen near Boulder, Colorado, and dined on dog food, brownies and honey. People are rarely hurt in such incidents. But a state wildlife official warned that if home construction near mountainous areas continues at a feverish pace, and the bears continue to lose habitat, more dangerous confrontations are inevitable.

As for bears showing up in unlikely places, such as Boston's near- suburbs or the 350-pound male killed by a pickup truck on the busy Baltimore-Washington Parkway, blame nature. "Young male bears are kicked out of their homes when they reach a certain age and look for new and interesting places to live," says Maryland Department of Natural Resources spokesman John Surrick. The cubs that padded into Phoenix may have been abandoned by their mothers during a severe drought. "There was nothing for them to eat, no acorns or berries in the mountains and no prickly pears in the desert," Arizona Game's Pat O'Brien says. "One of the cubs weighed only 20 pounds. It should have been a 50-pound bear."

In Louisiana and adjacent states, however, the issue is too few breeding bears or, in the swamps of east Texas, none at all. In the 1800s, fur traders shipped thousands of bearskins from New Orleans to Europe. (Elite regiments of the British army have worn towering bearskin hats since the Napoleonic Wars.) But what ultimately turned the region's once abundant and genetically unique bear into a virtual black ghost was the conversion of bottomland forests to farmland in the last century.

According to Mike Vaughn at the Virginia Cooperative Fish and Wildife Research Unit, there are close to a million black bears in North America, with Alaska and Canada accounting for half the continental population. However, there are only 500 Louisiana black bears in the Pelican State, Mississippi and southern Arkansas combined.