By James-Clifton Spires/Senior Staff Writer
CUMBERLAND GAP NATIONAL HISTORIC PARK — Bears must be wild creatures — and the key to keeping them that way is to educate human beings not to feed them.
“Why Good Bears Go Bad” was a theme addressed by park employees and other wildlife experts at a meeting at the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park (CGNHP) Tuesday night. Approximately 40 people attended the meeting, which park officials will be the first of several informational sessions on the issue of interactions between humans and bears, particularly the black bears that are native to eastern Kentucky, southeast Virginia and northeast Tennessee.
Those participating in the program as resource people included CGNHP Superintendent Mark Woods, Head Ranger Dirk Wiley and Resource Management Specialist Jenny Beeler; Steve Dobie, coordinator for the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s black bear wildlife program; Bell County Game Warden Ray Lawson; and Mike Hensley and Dave Busick, officers with the Middlesboro Police Department.
According to Woods, the park first became aware of human-bear interactions in 2001.
“That’s when they started enjoying people food,” he said. In response, the park has made a concentrated effort to study the bear’s activities in the park, including their travel range and mating and feeding habits. Efforts also are being made to “bear-proof” park dumpsters and campgrounds, he said.
But most importantly, “the most current effort is to engage local communities,” Woods said.
Wiley said that the presence of bears in the national park or wildlife preserves is seen as a good thing.
“Five or six years ago, a park neighbor sighted a bear and said, ‘Whaddya gonna do about it?’” Wiley said. “I said, ‘We’re going to have a party.’ We consider (the presence of bears) a benchmark of a healthy park.”
Of course, the increase of bears in a park dedicated to preserving wildlife can create problems, Wiley acknowledged. Bears, like all animals, do not recognize human geographic boundaries and being particularly smart creatures, learn quickly that human habitats can provide a veritable smorgasbord of tasty treats, including garbage, pet food and other edibles left in easy access for the bears.
As a result, the park employees found themselves in the business of educating the public about what to do — and what not to do — to prevent bears from becoming nuisances.
“Suddenly, we (at the park) needed to work with local law enforcement,” Wiley said. “We needed to work with park wildlife resource folks, with the interpretative folks.”
The city of Middlesboro and the National Park have a mutual aid agreement regarding bears — one that was tested several times this past year when a few curious (and hungry) bears wandered a local trailer park in the city’s East End and throughout the Ambleside community.
An Ambleside problem bear — also known as “the Beltline bear” — was reported by the Middlesboro policemen present as having been spotted at least five times. The officers also reported a case that occurred five or six years ago in which a problem bear was spotted foraging in garbage bins behind Burger King, Sonic and Lee’s restaurants along U.S. Highway 25E.
This past summer, Wiley was personally involved in a chase by Middlesboro police and residents of the East End trailer park off Avondale Avenue. A nuisance bear, enjoying a buffet meal from garbage cans in the community, ignored attempts to “haze” the bear away with non-violent means, such as shouts or barking dogs. “We gathered everyone there together while a gun filled with rubber buckshot was fired at the bear’s rear end,” Wiley said. “Then when the bear reared up in surprise, we all started shouting at the bear and he ran off.” The theory is that the bear will associate the non-lethal pain of the rubber buckshot with the sound of human voices and be disinclined to return to the area.
“Hazing bears is a last resort,” Wiley cautioned. “If you can’t get rid of a bear five to seven times, chances are it’s going to not going to work.”
Because bears — being large and intelligent wild animals will follow their instincts to find food in the easiest manner possible — the park and wildlife officials emphasize that it is necessary for human beings to be responsible when the human and ursine species interact.
“Jenny (Beeler’s) fond of saying, ‘It’s easier to educate the people than the bears,” Wiley said.
Dobie discussed the foraging range of bears in eastern Kentucky, which covers about a third of the counties in the state. The greatest number of sightings seems to be in a “core area” that includes Floyd, Harlan, Letcher and Pike counties, although Bell County, which contains the Cumberland Gap National Historic Park, is also high on the list.
Kentucky’s bear population is not as great as in three neighboring states, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, Dobie said. Because of this, there is no hunting season for bears in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
“As for hunting, we’re not there yet,” Dobie said. “There’s no bear season in Kentucky. In fact, it’s illegal to feed black bears, even accidentally. There’s the possibility of a fine of up to $1,000 and a jail sentence of up to a year in prison.”
Using a slideshow, Dobie displayed examples of when well-meaning and/or non-thinking people intentionally fed bears by leaving leftover meat from cookouts out at campgrounds “because the animals have to eat, right?” In one photograph that Dobie described as “the worst of the worst,” someone had left a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts in an open box in an obvious attempt to attract bears.
“No one accidentally leaves out a box of a dozen doughnuts,” Dobie said.
Threats to black bears, however, are almost always traced to human behavior, which includes not a lot of tolerance for bears foraging for food on human property, and on highways, where bears desperate for food may be struck and killed by motor vehicles.
Historical influences that have diminished Kentucky’s bear population include loss of habitat, especially because of clear cut logging, and an unregulated harvest of bears.
The recent return of black bears to Kentucky has been influenced by forest regeneration, mature hardwood forests, especially those with good acorn crops and large tracts of land with low human densities — such as the mountainous counties of eastern Kentucky and protected forested areas such as national or state parks. Regulatory protection also has helped the black bear’s comeback in Kentucky.
“Black bears have high survival rates,” Dobie said.
South central Kentucky’s McCreary County, on the Tennessee border, is being watched as a potential growth site for bear populations, Dobie said.
“McCreary County is seeing a lot of activity,” he said. “It’s just above Big South Fork, where there was a (recent) successful introductory effort.”
Dobie said that bears have been seen in Kentucky as far north as Boone County, just outside of Cincinnati, and as far west as Hardin County. Usually, the bears seen furthest from a core area are male and particularly young males at least one year old whose mothers have pushed them away to fend for themselves to make room for fresh litters. Younger male bears also tend to be forced out of their original habitat by older males who have laid claim to certain territories.
“Male bears will move as much as 100 miles,” Dobie said, adding that the range for females tends to be much smaller, as females tend to stay near the foraging range of their mothers.
Dobie described bears as solitary animals, which stick to themselves, except during summer breeding seasons. Wildlife resource management teams are having success in using radio collars and ear tags to track the movements and behavior of some bears.
The number one source of problems between humans and bears, according to all the speakers at the meeting?
Food!
“Black bears are pretty much like vacuum cleaners,” Dobie said. “Everything is food to them. Everything except granite.”
“Female bears must eat and eat and eat so they can go into the den and hibernate and produce milk to feed between two and three cubs (when they wake up) in March,” Dobie said.
The most frequent sightings of bears occur between April and August when their instinct causes them to actively hunt for food to put on weight for the winter. The same time period includes breeding season for bears.
Black bears rely on acorns, berries, insects, vegetation, fish and carrion to survive. They hibernate primarily due to lack of food, usually between November and April, though this varies. Healthy mothers produce one to two cubs every two to three years.
Why is feeding so bad?
“Bears are extremely intelligent,” Dobie said. “They learn about discarded food and they hang around. Bears are extremely tolerant of people. When they learn they get fed, they hang around people. Then they get shot. They get hit by cars. Or they get euthanized.
The process that causes a good bear to go bad takes several steps. A bear whose behavior is considered “normal” will seldom be seen by humans and gets all its food supply from natural sources as described above. The first step toward becoming a nuisance bear takes place when a bear begins roaming around at night close to human communities but still not making contact because bears are usually afraid of people.
The third step in the nuisance process occurs when the bear continues to hunt at night but is seen by humans. The fourth step occurs when the bear becomes active in its search for human food discards during the day time.
“In the last stage, the bear is active in the daytime with people present,” Dobie said. “This is the point of no return. There’s little chance of correcting the behavior and they can rarely be reformed. If you move them, all it will do is create a problem somewhere else.”
Relocation of bears is, at best, a temporary solution. Dobie described a bear in McCreary County which was relocated in August 2006 to Martin County in Kentucky’s northeast section. By December, the bear had migrated down to Harlan County and eventually, it was struck by a vehicle and killed in Pike County.
Another bear, a female, was described as “a cub factory” in Kingdom Come State Park. She had five cubs in one season and four the next year. The park was described as “a bear buffet table,” Dobie said. In March, the bear, with a radio collar, was moved to Martin County and traced to Fishtrap Lake Wildlife Management area by April 7 and then back to Kingdom Come by this past summer.
Dobie said that the goal of park and wildlife management professionals is to protect bears, but ultimately, if a bear becomes a threat to humans, “There’s no human life out there that’s worth less than a bear.” In other words, no one wants to kill a bear but these professionals will if there’s a perceived threat.
Beeler said that management of bears is everyone’s responsibility and noted that “hot dogs, fried chicken and watermelon rinds are some of the most lethal substances known to bears” because such items cause bears to return to human communities to search for more.
Sightings of such “pan handler” bears, as Beeler described them, should be reported to park and wildlife authorities immediately, especially if the bears are in public areas, campgrounds or near nature trails. Necessary information, when available, should include the time of incident, food the bear may have eaten, proximity to human beings, cars or structures, presence of tags or collars and the size of the bear.
“We are heavily invested in keeping the bears wild,” Wiley said. “There’s a huge amount of effort being put into caring for the bears and protecting the people who come in contact with the bears.”
Wiley said future community meetings to discuss human-bear relations will be arranged in accordance with public demand.
James-Clifton Spires is senior staff writer for the Daily News. His e-mail address is jcspires@middlesborodailynews.com.
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