What to Do if You Encounter a Black Bear in the Wild
You’re diligent about stowing your food in a bear locker at camp, but you still might run into an ursine giant on the trail. Don’t panic—and use this advice from Look Big, the guide to animal encounters
Black bears, also known as Ursus americanus, can be found from the Berkshires to Banff—and they’re as big as a sofa.
It’s awe inspiring, if terrifying, to see bears in the wild. It’s also rather jarring to watch them crawl up the carpeted stairs of a ski condo while a guy hiding in the closet films it on his phone, then posts it on YouTube.
There are countless home videos like these online of bears where they shouldn’t be: climbing over a car windshield while a baby screams in the backseat; throwing a pool party in Connecticut, which was cute, in a NIMBY kind of way. There was also a recent incident at Lake Tahoe, not online, unfortunately: a tray of pot brownies, just out of the oven, left cooling on the windowsill while everyone went out for a walk. When the people returned, they found that the bear, like Goldilocks, had eaten them all up.
Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Jeff Östberg
Encounters with black bears are on the rise, says Ann Bryant, director of the Lake Tahoe–based BEAR League. “Twenty years ago, we’d get five calls a day; now we get two hundred,” she says: there are more tourists, more locals living among the bears—then leaving windows open, food out, trashcans filled—and never learning how to properly live with them.
“Fifty percent of the time, we coach idiots,” says Bryant. Like the dad who smeared peanut butter on his toddler’s nose, then waited for a bear to lick it off (photo op, he’d explained) or the dude who left a cookie trail leading from his backyard to his couch because he thought it’d be fun to, you know, film a bear eating cookies while watching TV.
Please don’t feed the bears! When they get too used to humans, they become a danger to themselves and us.