A short walk from a suburban driveway in Canton, Connecticut, a black bear and her cub sleep in their den, a shallow depression in leaf duff underneath a small brush pile and a few downed trees. State biologists Jason Hawley and Melissa Ruszczyk and technicians Kaitlyn Place and Megan Graham quietly surround the den. They shoot a dart loaded with sedative into the slumbering mother bear. Right away, she bolts and scoots up a nearby hemlock tree, where she hangs on to semi-dead branches about 15 feet above the ground. She soon passes out while leaning on a sharp branch.
The crew stands below, peering up at her precarious position; Hawley worries the branch could block her breathing. One of the state staffers drives a pickup truck into the woods and parks beside the tree. Hawley jumps into the truck bed and shimmies up the tree. Hugging the trunk below the bear, he nudges her motionless body back and forth until finally she falls, grazing the truck and cracking its windshield.
Hawley has been through this kind of thing many times. “In my career I’ve had 140 to 150 bears fall out of trees,” he says. “Only one was injured.”
Soon, they have the bear sleeping peacefully on a tarp. She looks healthy: solid, shaped a little like a large 1950s refrigerator, and covered in sleek, dark brown fur. Her pink tongue hangs out a bit. Golden-tinged fur surrounds the pads of her giant paws. On her ear hangs an orange tag, “185.” This bear is sometimes called “Satan Bear” because she ranges near Satan’s Kingdom State Recreation Area on the Farmington River, west of Hartford, Connecticut.
The team members lean over her, doing their work. They take blood and saliva samples and change her GPS collar. The collar will help them track the bear’s movements in her home range and, within that range, her “core area”—the smaller region in which she spends at least half of her time
The 2-month-old cub sits on the lap of state conservation officer Alexandra Blackwell, half inside her coat; it’s 43 degrees out. This cub is so young that she doesn’t mind a human holding her, but she will be naturally wary of people very soon, so the biologists have come now, before their presence might interfere. They hoist mama bear up in the tarp to weigh her, then slide her gently back into the shallow den and snuggle the cub beside her. After she wakes up, she will smell that humans have been here and will probably move her den uphill, dragging brush to create another semi-open shelter, rounding out an area in the ground to nurse and protect her cub.
The goal is that mother and cub will never remember this visit. It’s part of the team’s greater mission to keep Connecticut bears wild through study and guidance. What bears need the most, the biologists say, is to be left alone. But leaving bears alone can be difficult in Connecticut. The bears come to the people.
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Black bears in Connecticut number around 1,200, most of them in the state’s rural and heavily forested northwest. But they are moving. With no natural predators and no hunting season here, they thrive, with little fear of humans while living ever closer to civilization. In the first four months of 2024, residents reported 1,888 bear sightings to the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP). Conflicts with bears—whether over trash cans, bird feeders, farm animals, or the like—were reported in more than half of the state, especially west of the Connecticut River.
For the past several years, bears have been expanding east and south into Avon, Granby, West Hartford, Farmington, Canton, Hartland, and other places west of Hartford. They are also moving south, near the shoreline of Long Island Sound. They seem unfazed by areas where streets, industry, and houses butt up against state forest and other natural lands. They are extending their territory by swimming across the Connecticut River. “Eastern Connecticut could support as many bears as western,” Hawley says. “It’s such good habitat that they will be there eventually.”
Connecticut’s recent bear-human encounters have been a mix of unnerving and downright scary. A bear tried to drag a 10-year-old boy into the woods in Morris in October 2022. Last year in Avon, a bear bit a 74-year-old woman out walking her dog, and another encounter made national news when a bear got into a crate of cupcakes outside an Avon bakery and did not budge until it had devoured five dozen. A Simsbury woman walked into her kitchen on a Friday afternoon this past May and found the pantry ransacked and a female bear eating and dragging food out to the deck, from which she had broken in via a screened window. State environmental police killed that bear, according to their policy, because she was using houses for food and would continue.
Although 70 to 80 percent of their diet is plants, especially acorns and berries, black bears will eat anything. They will eat turkey eggs, turkeys, deer fawns, dead deer, and other creatures. Hawley has watched bears dismantle a beaver lodge and grab the inhabitants. This is normal behavior by wild animals.
But normal for a Connecticut bear now also means ambling through town. Bears roam up driveways, through backyards, into garages and kitchens, looking for calories. They scoop birdseed out of dangling feeders; they pull lids off garbage cans and eat what they find. They steal farm animal feed. And they will make their dens near or under buildings, attracted to the warmth.
Western District conservation officer Jesse Nivolo says state police have answered burglary calls and found the “burglar” was a bear. “They don’t take anything of value, and they eat everything in the house,” he says.
Every year, a bear will break into a car somewhere. In Hartland, a bear smelled food inside a Toyota Prius and managed to open the door and climb in. Then it could not get out—and panicked. “Everything was destroyed,” Hawley says. “The steering wheel was gone.” In Sharon, a bear broke into a Volkswagen Rabbit that had been converted to biodiesel, running on used fryolator grease. The bear found jugs of the grease inside and ate it.
After the Craig family in Goshen found the shredded remains of an Amazon package that had gone missing from their front porch—with the bicycle helmet they’d ordered left behind—they placed a trail camera on a nearby tree. “Within a three-day period we had five large bears wander down our front walk,” Melissa Craig says.
On an early evening last October, Jay Cox was reading on his back deck in rural North Guilford. His golden retrievers, Bunker and Mosey, lay at his feet. He looked up and spotted a bear lumbering up toward the stone wall that ran below the deck. He called quietly to his wife, Dody. They moved the dogs inside and started filming. They remembered that earlier in the season they’d noticed knocked-down bird feeders and one of the suet cages discarded in the woods. Now the large bear—one not tagged by the state—swaggered to a feeder swinging from the branch of a dogwood tree and began scooping out and eating birdseed. A minute later, Cox says, the bear “gave it a little whack” and ambled away, back toward the woods.
“We took our feeders down,” he says. “We have not put them back up. I miss them. But I loved the bear. He was very dear. He was really cool.”
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A major part of the bear biologists’ work is answering calls from people who don’t know what to do when bears walk onto their properties.
This is an excerpt. Read the full article here:
https://newengland.com/yankee/magazine/the-bears-next-door-black-bears-in-connecticut/#
