There’s bear sign all across New England. The bear-marked beeches in the northern hardwoods, claws gouging a route up the smooth, gray trunks – relict evidence of mast years past. The bear wallows: Muddy, soft edges. Tangled vegetation. A snapped-off spruce alongside.
In the winter woods, there is no fresh sign, but the bears are here. They’re in tree hollows, under brush piles, tucked beneath glacial erratics left behind 10,000 years ago. They’re peppered across the landscape in sleepy stasis, under the blanket of ice and snow.
Because most bear encounters are mere glimpses, so much of a bear’s presence is assumed and imagined. Until it isn’t. Once, in seasonal housing in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I woke to a bear with her nose pressed against the screen lining my open bedroom window. The bear was eagerly sniffing a Tupperware of snacks I had pushed up against the wall. She sounded just like my dog. Another time, I peeked out from my tent and watched a small black bear trying to puzzle open the tailgate of the truck where we had stored our food for the night. When I clicked on my headlamp the little bear dropped to all fours and, with indisputable sheepishness, ambled back down the road. A few years ago, while visiting my family in upstate New York, I saw a large bear struggling to reach a birdfeeder strung on a line between two trees. The bear stood up, bipedal, human-like, and stretched his arms above his head, neck craning. When he still came up short, he bent his knees and jumped.
I have always loved bears. Every glimpse I catch of one is a privilege. But not everyone feels that way. Bears can cause very expensive, very real problems. Beyond the petty crimes of pilfered hiker backpacks and tipped trash cans, bears do serious damage to property, livestock, and crops every year. According to a 2019 interview on Vermont Public about bears damaging corn in the town of Huntington, crop damage to a single farmer alone can cost tens of thousands in losses.
Bear damage changes year to year. In mast years, for instance, they’re much less likely to seek out human food sources. However, incidents of bear-human conflict are generally on the rise in New England. This rise is in part the result of ample amounts of high-quality food in urban landscapes, combined with shorter hibernation periods due to climate change and the increased development of forested landscapes. Today, Vermont is home to between 7,000 and 8,500 black bears.
While this population is a high point for the state, according to Jaclyn Comeau, Vermont Fish and Wildlife’s black bear project leader, it is not unprecedented. Continued population growth could trigger changes in the state’s management actions, however. “We’re watching closely,” said Comeau in a phone interview in February.
There’s something undeniably familiar about the black bear. Maybe it’s the bipedal walk or the hand-like paws. Or maybe it’s that, according to Ben Kilham’s In the Company of Bears, “it’s quite possible that pre-human and early human culture and communication looked a lot like a bear’s.”
While this may seem far-fetched, Dr. Kilham, a gunsmith-naturalist turned PhD researcher, has 30 years of field experience with black bears to back up his theory. He first began rehabilitating black bear cubs in the spring of 1993 as a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Since then, over 600 bear cubs have passed through the Kilham Bear Center in Lyme, New Hampshire, before being released back into the wild.
In addition to giving black bear cubs a second chance at life, the Center has allowed Kilham unprecedented opportunities to study bears as they grow and develop. Rather than being solitary, bears, as Kilham told me in a phone call, “are social, like we are.” According to his research, they even have friends. These unrelated bears often travel through the forest together, searching for and sharing food. When I questioned him about his use of the word “friends,” he responded readily: “What else would you call it?”
In the spring of 1996, Squirty arrived at the Kilham Bear Center. Named for her then-diminutive stature, the 28-year-old bear now rules her home range in New Hampshire. Generations of female black bears, down to great-granddaughters, share Squirty’s patch of forest. Squirty is a foundational subject in Kilham’s decades of research and, according to In the Company of Bears, enjoys Oreos. In fact, he writes, he knows she can count to 12 because she always knows if there’s a cookie missing from the sleeve. Their relationship is one built on decades of trust and paid for by food. Kilham claims she sees him as both a fellow bear and as her mother.
Through his work, Kilham has effectively upended scientific knowledge about the lives of black bears. In addition to having friendships, he’s found that black bears are members of a complex and dynamic society – a society with relationships and social contracts, organized by matrilinear hierarchies in which a dominant female bear shares a home range with her female descendants.
Bears, whose sense of smell is thousands of times more sensitive than ours, rely on what Kilham calls a “complex olfactory web” of information crisscrossing the forest to communicate with one another. In acts of reciprocal altruism, they often leave behind purposeful scent trails to share food sites with their fellow bruins. Sharing surplus food is a gesture of goodwill between bears and represents a favor that will, someday, be returned.
Unfortunately for all involved, humans leave surplus food, or food-scented things, everywhere. Dumpsters piled high. Grills that haven’t been cleaned since the last barbecue. Birdseed dangling temptingly in feeders. Chickens stacked neatly in their coops for the evening. Unsecured apiaries and apple trees. A candy bar left in an unlocked vehicle. The list goes on.
Since humans don’t effectively mark ownership over our food stores through scent signals the way bears do, they interpret what we leave out as up for grabs, a sign of interspecies goodwill. After all, according to bear-world social conventions, it is. This simple miscommunication results in the State of Vermont fielding 800 to 1,400 bear incident reports annually. Each year state officials end up euthanizing 15 to 40 bears whose unintended crimes have crossed the line of human tolerance.
Fortunately, according to Comeau, Vermont officials are extremely hesitant to take lethal measures against bears. “We’re not going to kill our way out of these problems,” she said, expounding on the other tools wildlife managers use to deal with bears in the state. In addition to tweaking hunting seasons to curtail bear populations, managers may catch and frighten the bear with rubber bullets and loud noises so that the bear comes to associate humans with intense stress, a method known as “aversive conditioning.” Managers and landowners also use dogs to scare off bears. On rare occasions, if the bear is young enough, Vermont officials might relocate it to a less populated area. But most of all, education is key. From coaching homeowners through dealing with a “problem bear” over the phone to town-level presentations, much of Comeau’s work involves “trying to increase Vermonters’ bear IQ” through outreach efforts on all scales. Kilham agrees with this priority. “You’ve got to spend a lot of time on education,” he said. Often, in his experience, bears end up taking the blame for human negligence.
I find it reassuring that wildlife managers in Vermont are far from trigger-happy when it comes to managing bears, but the rising prevalence of bear-human conflict – a conflict humans can prevent – is disheartening. We know better. We can do better. Why don’t we?
“We need to accept,” Comeau said, “that coexistence is going to be messy, not perfect.”
Our coexistence is messy. It probably always will be. Bear and human worlds are built upon different foundations. We speak different languages, have different customs, expect different things from our neighbors and friends.
But, as Kilham has demonstrated, it is possible for us to understand one another. It’s at least possible for us to try. Gloria Dickie, in her recent book Eight Bears, describes human coexistence with bears as “an ongoing process of innovation, determination, and, ultimately, compassion.”
It’s so easy for me to look to pure science and numbers for an end-all solution. To forget that bears are not just a population of mammals, but a society of dynamic and creative individuals. I’m not quite sure how to hold science in balance with the practice of compassion, but maybe it’s rooted in wholeheartedly considering that our human society is one of many, cobbled together across a constantly changing and fragmented landscape. Maybe it’s time to decide that too much has already been lost in translation here in Vermont. That since the bears were here first, it’s only right for us to be the ones to learn to speak their language.
After all, it’s a bear’s world. It always has been. We just live in it.
