Please Bear With me

I like bears. I like bears more than I like people, which I suppose isn’t saying much, but still. I like black bears, Ursus americanus, in particular, since they’re our local species, and my fondness for grizzlies is leavened by a healthy amount of dread. My few encounters with wild grizzlies instilled within me awe and terror; my encounters with black bears generally give me a sense of camaraderie. The slow amble, the amiable scratch against a tree trunk, the curiosity that often leads to trouble: the black bear is a very relatable animal. Which is not to say they aren’t deserving of a healthy amount of respect, and perhaps a good dose of fear as well. All large animals deserve a certain amount wariness and circumspection, even the domesticated, as I’ve been reminded of all too often by protective mother cows and pigs. And bears, in addition to being large, and at least partially carnivorous, are representative of the wild that they inhabit. It’s easy to overlook that fact as they stroll leisurely across suburban Connecticut lawns or rifle through garbage cans for old takeout containers, but wild they are, and they bring a piece of wildness with them when they visit. It’s another reason I find them so appealing. And a reason to tread carefully in their presence.

For years, the population of black bears in our area has been increasing, and with it the tension that comes with co-habitating with large, occasionally aggressive wildlife. For me, it’s a positive development. I want to live in a region that is wild enough to support bears, I want to glimpse them on occasion and be reminded of a more primitive sort of existence. Yet I’ll admit that encountering a bear while hiking in the woods or spotting one from a distance is a different experience than having your garage ransacked or your bee hives torn apart. Having a farm, having vulnerable livestock to care for, gave the presence of bears and other predators a good deal more nuance in my mind. They became sources of worry, though not enough for me to sour on them. Our guard dogs, Great Pyrenees, were always enough to keep them clear of the farm, and in twelve years no bear gave us any real problem. When we moved into our new house last year, however, bears became a more central feature in our lives.

Our first full spring in our home, we were seemingly swarmed by black bears. Our land is half of a valley that slopes down to a passing stream, and is very close to a large tract of undeveloped state reservoir holdings. It’s perfect black bear habitat. By my count, including cubs, we were visited by possibly eleven different bears last spring. Most merely passed through our lower field and were gone, but at least one or two brazenly came up to our lawn to pull down our bird feeders. One invaded our garage in search of more sunflower seed, and one even came up onto our second floor back porch to snag another hanging feeder. In fairness, had I realized how prevalent bears would be here, the feeders would never have been left up in the first place. But at the farm, less than a mile away, I’d never even seen a bear, only evidence of their activity on very rare occasions. The bustle of the farm, and the three Great Pyrenees in particular, had been enough of a dissuasion to keep bears out of sight, or at least moving through at a brisk pace. I had assumed that as we continued to turn our current land into more of a homestead, and the dogs came here to live, that the bears would sense their presence and avoid our land as they had the farm. That seemed to be the case, and a warm April this year came and passed with no visitations. But that changed yesterday.

It was mid-morning, slightly overcast and a bit blustery, but a good spring day nonetheless. I was doing a bit of yard work, my wife was inside working, and my mother and mother-in-law were playing with my daughter. We recently fenced in our back field, a three acre parcel, and now it houses our three Pyrenees, nine year old Baloo and three year old siblings Samwise and Valkyrie (as well as three new kid goats, fifteen young chickens, and few ducks). The fence runs along our back yard, then links up to our separate garage, continuing down from the far side of the garage along our side lawn; from along the back yard section, you can’t easily see up past the garage and down the far length. We had all been in the back yard, and the dogs and goats had been along the fence with us, but as I continued with chores the ladies took the baby up to the driveway in front of the garage, and the dogs had circled up around the garage to stay with them. I kept puttering around the back yard. Suddenly, I was startled by shouting, and though I had ear-buds in and couldn’t make out the words, the uproar was unmistakable. My first fear was for the baby, and my stomach contracted and I bolted across the lawn as fast as I could. But as I tore out my ear phones and came around to the front of the garage I spotted my mother-in-law with the baby, both fine, and I heard what my mother had been yelling to me. She’d been yelling ‘bear’.

Ordinarily a bear in the yard would be no cause for alarm, though we’d all drop what we were doing to go have a good look from a respectful distance. But this bear was on the wrong side of the fence, in the interior field side. And the dogs were after it. The bear must have just crossed the four-foot tall box wire because it was only just on the other side of it. The dogs had only scented or spotted the beast when they came up around the far side of the garage, yet they were on it in a flash. I ducked into the garage and grabbed the first stout thing I could lay hands on, a bank blade, for though I didn’t want or expect to use it I wouldn’t go close to the bear without something to fend it off with in the worst case scenario. I assessed the situation as I ran towards the uproar and was grateful even in my panic: the bear was not overly large, and the dogs, barking crazily though they were, were keeping a few feet of distance. Still, they had the bear surrounded, and they backed it up to the base of a hickory tree as I started bawling at them to back away. That didn’t do much good. I would succeed in driving one dog away but couldn’t do anything from the far side of the fence to get them to stay, and as I turned my attention to another, the previously chastised dog would dart back to the fray. I feared that it was only a matter of seconds before the bear had enough of the yapping pack and sent one to the vet, or worse, with a swipe of its paw.

Yet thankfully the bear had more sense than the dogs, and rather than attack, it retreated up the trunk of the tree. It wasn’t particularly big as far as black bears go, not too much larger in fact than the Pyrenees. I’d put the weight at somewhere between 150 and 200 lbs, and it was perhaps a two year old. It stopped about ten feet up the hickory and looked down at the barking dogs in anger. It hissed, made a whining sort of growl, and popped its jaws together in a threat display, but though I found the warning unnerving the dogs were unperturbed. I realized that my only option would be to go in, haul the dogs out by their collars, and lock them up. That would put me unsettlingly close to an antagonized bear. If a vet visit was unappealing, a doctors visit was doubly so. Still, my concern for the dogs was paramount and I had to get them away, so I went into the fencing through the far gate, gave the bear in the tree as wide of a berth as I could, and grabbed Baloo by his collar to pull him away. The maneuver took me closer than I’d have liked to the spitting ursine form, and as I looked up at the bear from a mere few feet away I saw the cause of the whole disastrous encounter. I spotted the cubs.

There were three of them, small black forms no bigger than house cats, and they were perched precariously in the uppermost branches of the hickory, a good fifty or sixty feet off the ground. The bear was a sow, who had retreated up the tree to protect her cubs, and all the warnings about the dangers of a bear with cubs crashed upon me. I needed top get myself and the dogs away from the sow before she decided to come back down the tree and get aggressive. Thankfully my harsh words through gritted teeth and firm hand on the collar were enough to budge Baloo. I led him out the gate and managed, with help from my mother (who had gone into iPhone documentarian mode as she does whenever something the least bit interesting happens) to get him shut in our nearby market van. Seeing the older dog locked away, the two younger dogs seemingly realized the folly of their ways. They gave up the baying and retreated to the gate as well just as I turned around to go and get them. With the three dogs shut away, a sort of calm was restored. The bear had gone a bit further up the tree. She perched in a fork about fifteen feet off the ground, still panting and snapping her jaws. I bent over double and worked to catch my breath and collect my wits.

After watching the sow and cubs for a short time from a slightly more comfortable distance, we retreated till we were largely out of sight. From what I could puzzle out, the bear and cubs must have come across the road and, encountering our fence, the cubs had squeezed through the wire rather than go around as one would have hoped. The sow, obligated to follow, had then clambered over; I could see the slight indent in the top strand of the box wire that marked her passage. That was when the dogs must have surprised them. Thankfully, the cubs had the instinct to shoot up the nearest tree, and bear, bless her, had the level-headedness to not make disemboweling the canines her new life’s mission. Now there was nothing to do but wait for fear to subside and the cubs to descend the tree and depart. It took the better part of an hour, but eventually they returned to earth, and the family of four went on their way. They went down across our field, and encountering the fence at the bottom, the cubs again squeezed through and the mother again climbed over. I shadowed them as they went, and they caught sight of me once more, climbing another pine tree for security, though I was at least fifty yards distant. Eventually I left them in peace and went back to the house. I hoped the morning’s drama had been enough to keep them well clear of our field in the future. Certainly it had shaken me up.

The story has no particular moral or resolution. It was a bit of panic and excitement that ended much, much better than it could have. My enthusiasm for bears remains undimmed, though this was as potentially dangerous an encounter as I’ve had, and as worried as I’ve been of a bear since my days hiking in grizzly territory out west. Perhaps it was a healthy realignment of perceptions. It’s easy to anthropomorphize animals, black bears in particular, and easy to get complacent in their presence. The worst thing for bears is human encouragement: it often ends with a call to DEP and a dead bear. A healthy amount or fear is appropriate for all parties in this inter-species encounter, with perhaps the balance of fear being ideally borne by the bear, since of the two species man is far, far more dangerous. For my part, my concern over the incident was about the dogs, and yet it’s the dogs who make co-habitation with bears possible in the first place. Guard dogs allow us to farm, to raise animals, without worry about predation or needing to resort to extirpation of our neighboring species. The dogs keep our livestock safe, but in a round-about way they also keep the bears safe. The system only breaks down when something unforeseen happens, something along the line of a few headstrong cubs and a too-permeable fence. Luckily, no one was hurt, no dogs, no bears, no me. I hope the sow and her cubs live safely and contentedly, and I hope I don’t see them anytime soon. And yet, paradoxically, longingly, I also hope that I do.