Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

In 1995, a cougar was presumed to have killed a young man found dead on a trail with puncture wounds to the neck, while the true murderer, a human being, walked free. In 2015, a wolf was wrongfully accused of pulling a man from his sleeping bag and killing him. Cases like these are one reason there is WHART: Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training (and by its founders’ admission, “a horrible acronym”). WHART is a five-day course—part lecture and part field training—taught by members of the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service.* Because they have the experience. British Columbia has more cougar attacks than any other North American state or province. It has 150,000 black bears—to Alaska’s 100,000—17,000 grizzlies, and 60 predator attack specialists, 14 of whom (the specialists but not the bears) have driven down from Canada to serve as WHART instructors this week. WHART 2018 is being hosted by the Nevada Department of Wildlife, which has offices in Reno. This fact helps explain why a training course for wilderness professionals would be held in a casino complex,

On the screen, a grizzly bear is attacking Wilf Lloyd of Cranbrook, British Columbia. The footage is part of a presentation entitled “Tactical Killing of a Predator on a Person.” The instructor sums up the challenge that Wilf’s son-in-law faced in trying to shoot the bear but not the man: “All you could see was the body of the bear and a limb of Wilf once in a while.” The son-in-law saved Wilf’s life but also shot him in the leg. Another challenge: Marksmanship deteriorates under the influence of adrenaline. Fine motor skills are out the window. The thing to do, we are told, is to “run directly up to that animal, plant the barrel and shoot upward” to avoid hitting the victim. Though you then run the risk of “attack redirection.” That’s a calm, technical way to say that the animal has dropped its victim and now it’s coming after you. A second video illustrates the importance of order and discipline in the face of animal-attack mayhem. In it, a male lion charges a safari hunter. The other members of the hunting party wheel and scatter. The video is paused at various moments when a rifle is pointing both at the lion and at a hunter directly behind it. “Stay tight and communicate,” is the advice here. We will be practicing this kind of thing later, in an immersive field scenario out in the scrub near the Truckee River, below the casino.

After one more presentation, we break for lunch. Preordered sandwiches are waiting for us to pick up at a small deli over in the casino. We stand in line, attracting curious glances. It’s unusual, I suppose, to see so many uniformed law enforcement professionals inside a gambling establishment. I collect my lunch sack and follow along behind a small group of conservation officers heading to the lawn outside. Their leather hiking boots squeak as they walk. “So she looks in her rearview mirror,” one is saying, “and there’s a bear in the back seat, eating popcorn.” When wildlife officers gather at a conference, the shop talk is outstanding. Last night I stepped onto the elevator as a man was saying, “Ever tase an elk?”

Bears’ teeth are their main weapon, and their lightly furred face is their weak spot. When bears attack humans, they apply the tactics they use in fights with other bears. “They go teeth to teeth, right? So their instinct is to go right for your face.” Joel Kline, our youthful, forthright instructor, has been an investigator on ten cases of bear attack. “They come right at you and you have all these massive injuries right to the face.” Joel’s own face—our focus as we take in his words—is blue-eyed, unblemished, peachy clear. I work hard not to picture it in that state. Bears are inelegant killers partly because they’re omnivores. They don’t regularly kill to eat, and evolution has equipped them accordingly. They feed on nuts, berries, fruit, grasses. They scavenge trash and carrion. A cougar, by contrast, is a true carnivore. It lives by the flesh of animals it kills, and thus it kills efficiently. Cougars stalk, well hidden, and then pounce from behind and deliver a “killing bite” to the back of the neck. Their molars close like scissors blades, cutting flesh cleanly. A bear’s mouth evolved for crushing and grinding, with flat molar surfaces and jaws that move side to side as well as up and down. Wounds made by bears’ teeth are cruder. And more numerous. “Bears are more bite bite bite bite.” Our manikin, says Joel, is how it usually goes. “It’s a big mess.”

Looking around at the manikins, I see not just bites and scratches but broad scalpings and skinnings. Joel explains the mechanics of this. A human skull is too large and round for a bear or cougar to position between its jaws and get the leverage it would need to crush or bite into it. So when it brings its teeth together, they may skid off the skull and tear away skin. Think of biting into a very ripe plum, how the skin pulls away. Deer, a popular entrée among cougars, have longer, more muscled necks than we have. When a cougar tries to make its trademark killing bite on a human, its teeth may encounter bone where normally there would be muscle. “They try to dig their canines in and they bring their teeth together and they take the flesh and remove it,” said WHART co-founder Kevin Van Damme, in a talk called “Cougar Attack Behavior.” Van Damme has astronaut looks and a voice that carries to the back of the Ponderosa Room without a microphone. I opened a decibel meter app on my phone at one point and was impressed to see him hit 79, about the level of a garbage disposal. The claw marks on our simulated victim rule out a cougar. Cats’ claws, unlike dogs’, create a cluster of triangular punctures as they sink in to grip their prey. With a bear attack, you’re more likely to see what we have here in front of us, the parallel rakings of a swipe. Joel takes a step closer to the manikin’s head. “ ’Kay, what else do we have here? Missing nose, lips, right? So later we’re going to ...

None of the manikin torsos in the room are laid open. There’s none of what Van Damme calls “feeding on innards.” I’m initially surprised by this. I know from research for a previous book that predatory carnivores tend to tear into the abdomen of their prey straightaway to get to the organs—the most nutritious parts. One possible reason you don’t see this as much on human victims, say our instructors, is that humans wear clothing. Both bears and cougars avoid clothed areas when they’re feeding or scavenging. Perhaps they don’t like how the cloth feels or tastes, or they don’t realize there is meat underneath.

Joel indicates a suite of wounds on the neck and shoulder. “Are we thinking perimortem or postmortem?” In other words, was our victim alive or dead as these wounds were inflicted? It’s important to know this, because otherwise a bear that was just scavenging could take the fall for a killing. Based on the bruising around the puncture wounds, we judge them to be perimortem. Dead people don’t bleed or bruise, a bruise being essentially a bleed beneath the surface of the skin. If blood is not being pumped, it doesn’t flow.

Joel tells us the story of a gnawed-upon corpse that was found near its car in the woods, partially buried under leaves. The bites appeared to have come from a bear, and a bear was trapped nearby, but there was little blood on and around the man’s body. Investigators found needle marks between the toes and a used syringe on the car floor. An autopsy confirmed that the man had died of an overdose. The bear, as Joel says, “just saw an opportunity to get some good, high fat and calor...

We move on now from victim evidence to animal evidence: evidence on or in a “suspect” that has been shot or captured near the scene of the attack. For instance, Joel is saying, you can look for the victim’s flesh up in the pockets of the gums of the (immobilized) animal. It’s odd to think of a bear getting human stuck between its teeth, but there you go. With cougars, Joel adds, it’s sometimes possible to recover the victim’s blood or flesh from the crevice on the interior of a claw. “So you need to push those out, those retractable claws, and you might have evidence under there, right?”

Claws can be misleading as indicators of the size of an attacker’s paw. When the animal steps down and transfers its weight onto a foot, the toes splay, making the foot appear larger. Investigators have to be cautious with measurements of claw or tooth holes in clothing as well, because the cloth could have been wrinkled or folded over as it was pierced.

Joel cautions that if the bear had been shot at the scene of the attack (rather than trapped afterward), its blood could mingle with the victim’s blood and muddy the DNA tests. “And how do we prevent that?” “Plug the wound!” And that is why men with the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service keep a box of tampons in the truck.

I mentioned a man found dead on a hiking trail with puncture marks on his neck. Investigators deemed it a cougar attack, even though there were no marks to suggest a set of matching upper and lower teeth. The wounds, it turned out, weren’t made by anyone’s teeth but by an ice pick. The murderer got away with the crime until twelve years on, when he bragged about it to a fellow inmate while serving time for something else.

Every so often, the opposite happens. A human is found guilty of a killing that was in fact committed by a wild animal. Most famously, there is Lindy Chamberlain, the Australian woman who screamed that she’d seen a dingo run off with her baby while the family was camping near Ayers Rock in 1980. We heard a presentation on the case from one of our instructors, predator attack specialist (and—stay tuned—survivor) Ben Beetlestone. Because the Australian investigators had no body and no dingo in custody, they could not do what we’re doing today. They could not link the victim evidence to the animal evidence. Without linkage, the trial turned on assumptions (for instance, that a dingo could not or would not carry off a ten-pound baby), human error, and a media frenzy that swayed public opinion. About three years after Chamberlain was convicted, a search party looking for the remains of a rock climber found a dingo lair with remnants of the baby’s clothes. Chamberlain was released and acquitted, and her conviction was overturned. The dingo really did eat her baby.

These days linkage often takes the form of a DNA match. Does DNA from the captured (or killed) suspect match DNA from hair or skin under the victim’s fingernails? Does the animal’s DNA match DNA from saliva on the victim? With animal attack cases, scavengers can complicate these efforts. While animal saliva near tooth marks on, say, a jacket has likely come from the attacking animal, saliva swabbed from the victim’s skin could have come from an animal that fed on the corpse later. Up in the Canadian wilderness there tend to be a lot of bears around, so good linkage is vital. Van Damme shared a story about a woman killed by a bear in her yard in Lillooet, British Columbia. His team set traps and ran DNA on two “bears of interest” before they scored a match with the third. The innocent bears were released.

You may have heard the ditty “If it’s black, fight back. If it’s brown, lie down.” The idea being that brown bears, of which grizzlies are a subspecies, may lose interest in a person who appears to be dead. Right away, a problem: brown bears’ fur can be black, and some black bears look brown. A more reliable way to distinguish the two is by the length and curvature of their claws, but by the time you’re in a position to make that call, the knowledge will be of limited practical use. The most important thing to consider, Aaron says, is not what kind of bear you are facing, but what kind of attack. Is it predatory or is it defensive? Most bear charges are defensive. They’re not really attacks, they’re bluffs. You’ve startled the bear, or you’re too close, and it would like you to back off. “It’s going to come across as big and scary. Its ears are upright, not back.” Aaron pauses to blow his nose. He has a miserable summer cold. “It may be swatting the ground. Huffing.” Popping or clacking its jaws. (But not roaring or growling. That’s mainly a movie thing.) Aaron stuffs the Kleenex in the pocket of his fleece. “It just wants to scare the crap out of you.” Grizzlies evolved in more open, less forested terrain than black bears. They often can’t just disappear into the trees as a startled black bear can and typically does. So they make you run instead. The recommended response to a bluff is to be as nonthreatening as you can. Back away slowly. Talk to the animal in a calm voice...

With a predatory attack, the survival strategy is the opposite. The rare predatory bear attack begins quietly, with focused intent. Counter to common assumption, it’s more often a black bear than a grizzly. (Though with both species, predatory attacks are rare.) The bear may be following at a distance, circling around, disappearing and reappearing. If a bear starts to charge with its ears laid flat, you’re the one who needs to look scary. Open your jacket to make yourself look larger. If you’re in a group, get together and yell, so you look like one big, loud creature. “Try to give the message, ‘I am not going to give up without a fight.’ ” Aaron says. “Stomp your feet, throw rocks.” The same holds true for an attacking cougar. Take inspiration from the Kansas pioneer N. C. Fancher, who in the spring of 1871 noticed a cougar eyeing him as he stood inspecting a buffalo skeleton. As recounted in Pioneer History of Kansas, Fancher shoved his feet inside the dead buffalo’s horns, banged its femurs over his head while jumping up and down, and “bellowed desperately.” The cougar, and really who wouldn’t, took off.

And if the animal goes ahead and attacks anyway? “Do whatever you can to fight back,” Aaron says. If it’s a bear, go for the face. Aaron points in the direction of his nose, a red chapped thing. “Don’t play dead.” If you play dead at ...

The worst thing you can do in any situation where a predator seems bent on attack is to turn and run. This is especially true with a carnivorous hunter like a cougar, because running (or mountain-biking) away triggers the predator-prey response. It’s like a switch, and once it’s f...

WHART instructor Ben Beetlestone experienced firsthand the determination and persistence of a cougar in attack mode. As a Conservation Officer in the mountainous West Kootenay region of British Columbia, he handles a fair number of predator attack calls—most involving bears and minor injuries. A few years ago, he responded to an unusual call. An emaciated cougar was skulking around a couple’s property. Beetlestone shared the experience during a presentation yesterday. He told us he got out of his truck, unarmed, and went up to knock on the door, not realizing the cougar was stalking the couple at that moment, through their windows. “If the guy left one room and went into another,” he told us, “the cougar went to that window.” The windows had paw prints. Suddenly the man slams the door. Beetlestone turns to see the cougar, five feet away, crouched, with its ears flat to its head and its tail swishing. “I’m yelling and screaming and kicking at it, all that stuff we tell the public to do. None of it is working.” The cougar jumps him. He tries to choke it, but it pulls away, turns, and sinks its teeth into his work boot. He grabs a broom that’s leaning against the house and hits the...

Our first task is to secure the area, to be sure no large animals are lurking. Cougars and bears sometimes cache the bodies of their victims, burying them lightly with leaves and brush and coming back later to feed some more. This makes the “crime scene” potentially dangerous for the response team.

We practiced the diamond-shaped sweep earlier. Four people move along back to back to back to back, weapons ready. It’s a human octopus with guns. Each person scans the quadrant in front of her (named for hours on a clock face: 12, 3, 6, and 9) and calls “Clear” if she sees no danger. Whereupon the person to her right calls “Clear.” Et cetera, around and around. Not only can the surroundings be monitored in all directions, but it’s safe in that no one can inadvertently point a weapon at anyone else. Should someone spot a threat, she calls it out, whereupon the people on either side move into position beside her. Now three rifles are aimed and ready, while one person watches the rear. When we practiced this earlier, Joel played the dangerous animal. I had hoped for some pantomime, maybe even a costume, but he’d just step in front of us and say, “I’m a bear.”

The animal tracks in the dirt are from a bear. This is good, because we didn’t learn about wolf attacks in class. (Because they almost never occur.)

Much can be learned from blood at a crime scene. Round drops on the ground suggest a “gravity pattern”: blood falling by its own weight from a wound. Oblong gravity drops suggest a victim running as he dripped. A “force-related pattern”—blood ejected by the force of, say, a paw swipe or the pressure of a major artery—is elongated, with a tail like a comet. It’s a spatter, not a drip. Someone finds a trail of drips. Joel tells us to look closely at their size. When drips of blood grow smaller as the trail progresses, they’re probably not coming from a wound. They might be dripping from the animal’s fur, or a murderer’s blade. If the size of the drips remains constant—a “replenishing trail”—they are likely coming from an “active bleeder.” A smear of blood is a “contact pattern,” perhaps a place where the victim fell or placed a bloody hand.

Wasn’t blood spatter analysis discredited (for human crime anyway)?

Had the body lain dead for any length of time, the chemicals of its decay would have left a final piece of evidence, a stain or area of blackened vegetation, called a “decomposition island.”

The manikin from our crime scene comes with some extras. Joel has just emptied onto a tabletop a bag of realistic moulage bear stomach contents: an ear and an eye and a strip of scalp with part of a mohawk haircut. These are passed around among our group. It’s early in the morning for such things. Doughnuts sit untouched. The stomach contents are a match for what’s missing on our manikin’s head, suggesting that indeed the bear, not the wolf, was behind the attack. The mohawk seems like a fanciful touch, but turns out not to be. Joel reveals that our scenario from yesterday was based on an actual attack—real bear, real man, real mohawk. Joel investigated this case in 2015. All the WHART manikins, in fact, represent not just real wounds but real attack victims.

Joel brought along photographs from the actual attack scene. One shows the victim’s backside. The largest wound, a raw, gaping, messy chomp, is to the buttocks. The man had been sleeping in one-piece long johns, and the flap, Joel says, must have opened while the bear was dragging him. “So that’s why there’s feeding right there.” After a moment, Joel adds, “You know the one with the bear paw prints on it? On the butt flap?” This is apparently a common item in Canada, because several of my group mates nod. “That’s what he was wearing.”

Canadian zoos won’t take bears older than three months, because they tend to pace and because zoos generally have enough bears.

“If a bear treats a person as food, it will do it again,” Van Damme said. “I have spent twenty-six years as a predator attack specialist. I know some of you disagree with me, but if it hurts a person, it’s going to die.”

Don’t let bears learn to associate humans with easy meals. Require that people in bear country secure their garbage. Tell them to stop feeding birds and leaving dogfood on the porch. The man in the long johns lived in the woods, where there was no garbage pickup. Trash likely piled up outside the trailer. The tinfoil and gum wrappers in the wolf’s stomach suggest that this was a place wild animals had become comfortable scavenging for scraps. Garbage is a killer.

† Scientists with the long-ago Division of Economic Ornithology used stomach contents as evidence in cases of birds accused of raiding farms, hunting stock, and commercial fishing operations. A 1936 U.S. Department of Agriculture report provides examples: eiders accused of decimating scallop beds, yellow-crowned night herons shot by froggers when in fact the birds had been eating crayfish, hunters killing marsh hawks because they thought they were preying on quail. In each case, the birds were exonerated by their stomach contents, a happy outcome for all except of course the individuals examined, who gave their stomachs that others might live. Maryland’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center housed a collection of thousands of glass jars of bird stomach contents, until pressing storage needs triggered a massive emesis into a Patuxent dumpster.

Compost and garbage are known in the parlance of human-bear conflict as “attractants.” Aspen municipal code requires both to be secured in bear-resistant containers.

What the garbage studies showed is that reinforced, locking bear-resistant containers make a solid difference—provided people take the time to latch them properly. In an area where 80 percent of the containers were used as they’re meant to be, there were 45 human-bear conflicts over the course of the study. A similar area with only 10 percent compliance had 272 conflicts. What this says is that containers aren’t enough. You also need laws requiring people to use them, and fines for people who ignore those laws. Aspen has all of this, but there has been a reluctance to follow through with the fines. Especially here, downtown.

It’s early fall, the time of year when black bears eat with purpose and abandon, to construct the fat they will live off in their dens over the winter.* A hyperphagic black bear doubles or even triples its daily calorie count, taking in as much as 20,000 calories. As omnivores, bears happily eat a variety of foods; during hyperphagia, what they are drawn to most powerfully is a concentrated source. They want to take in lots of calories without having to burn lots of calories wandering around looking for calories. The mountains around Aspen have always supplied that: acorn-dropping oak brush, fruiting serviceberry and chokecherry trees, the outrageous fecundity of crabapple trees. Come the 1950s and ’60s, the skiers began to move in. Bears looked up from their nuts and berries and went, Hurunh? Birdseed hanging on a tree? Bag of kibble sitting on a deck? Yes, please. Soon they ventured into town, following the humans, because the humans provide. The alleys behind Aspen’s multitudinous restaurants are concentrated-food-source nirvana.

Chapter 12.08 of Aspen’s solid-waste code, entitled “Wildlife Protection,” was modeled on that of the neighboring ski and mountain-bike resort village Snowmass. There the similarity fizzles out. Snowmass Animal Services/Traffic Control consists of Tina White and Lauren Martenson, and they are on it. “We ticket everyone,” White told me when we met yesterday. She recently put together a slide presentation in Spanish for restaurant kitchen staff, many of whom hadn’t realized what happens to bears that start raiding dumpsters when people neglect to lock them. Her efforts have been working. It’s been several years since a bear causing problems in Snowmass was, as White put it, “pulled out of the mix.” At the time of my visit, Aspen was up to nine for the year. Then again, Aspen is three times as populous, with four times the number of restaurants. Aspen’s garbage violations are handled by community response officers, five in all. Breck and I met with their representative, Charlie Martin, yesterday morning in a conference room at the Aspen Police Department. Charlie wore a black and yellow uniform, and a pair of socks on which rainbows alternated with unicorns. “It’s not Friday and I wasn’t on bike patrol,” he said, mysteriously, when I commented on them. Charlie listed some of the things his team was already struggling to keep up with when bear-related garbage infractions were added to the list: traffic violations, barking dogs, idling construction vehicles, 911 calls, rabid ba...

As it’s written, city code doesn’t require recycling dumpsters to be bear-resistant or locked or even covered, and people often toss in bags of trash. On the residential side, problems arise when homeowners rent out their property and the vacationers either aren’t told about, or don’t remember or don’t care about, the garbage laws.

One night not long ago, the restaurant’s manager, Roy, came out to roust the animal. Because the dumpster was set in an alcove, the bear’s escape was blocked on three sides. On the fourth side was Roy. With only one way out, the bear lunged and, quoting Charlie, “bit Roy in the ass.” According to University of Calgary professor emeritus and bear attack researcher Stephen Herrero, 90 percent of black bears that injure humans are bears that have habituated to them—that is, accustomed to their presence and lost their fear—and developed a taste for their foods.

People don’t want bears destroyed because of other people’s neglect. If anything, they want them hazed or relocated—the two nonlethal approaches you hear about most with “conflict bears.” (There’s also electric fencing, but the prison-camp look doesn’t play well in residential areas.) Hazing refers to the practice of supplying a frightening or painful experience such that the animal associates the unpleasantness with the location or the behavior underway when it began, and then avoids such in the future. In the case of these two bears, you’d need to station someone here in the alley during the wee hours with an implement of less lethal unpleasantness,† most likely a gun that shoots rubber ammunition or bean bags.

“Hazing is never going to solve this,” says Breck. The bigger bear rips deeper into his garbage bag. “There’s too much to be gained.” How well hazing works depends on the push and pull of risk and benefit. These bears have learned that a visit to this alley is likely to offer a caloric windfall. Weighed against those calories, the risk of another smack to the flank would be a risk worth taking. “And there’s too much other stuff nearby,” says Breck. “If you were to haze these bears right here, they’d just go over to the next alley.” When hazing does work, it generally does not do so for long. In 2004, a team of Nevada wildlife biologists assessed the effectiveness of hazing black bears in an urban locale. One group of bears was hazed with rubber bullets, pepper spray, and loud noises, and another group got all that plus a barking Karelian bear dog to run it off. A control group was not hazed. In terms of how much time passed before the bears returned, neither group stayed away significantly longer than the group that hadn’t been hazed. All but five bears out of the sixty-two followed in the study showed up again eventually, and 70 percent were back in fewer than forty days. Breck spent many a late night trying to haze bears during an epidemic of car break-ins at Yosemite campgrounds. Between 2001 and 2007, eleven hundred automobiles were broken into by bears. (Minivans were hit most often. While it’s possible some structural weakness contributed, Breck believes it had more ...

Adult black bears rarely stay put where they’re released. They have made their way home in journeys as lengthy as 142 miles—in one case including a 6-mile ocean swim. It is a remarkable achievement given that, unlike migrating birds, they can’t rely on internal magneto-gadgetry to help them navigate. Whether they are picking up sensory cues—the smell of the ocean, say, or the sound of an airport—or just trying out different directions until something feels familiar, is not known, but they are motivated and they are good at it. In a 2014 study, sixty-six conflict bears were radio-collared and translocated by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Thirty-three percent of the adults made their way back to the spot where they’d been captured, and none of the subadult bears did. Those read as fairly optimistic statistics; however, if you define success not as the failure to return but rather as surviving a year in the new home, the picture is less rosy. Translocated bears often wander into a new town close to where they’ve been released and start getting into the same kind of trouble. More than 40 percent of translocated bears in Yellowstone National Park and 66 percent in Montana were involved in another “nuisance event” within two years. Yosemite rangers tried translocating the bears that were breaking into cars, moving them to the other side of the park. The result: car break-ins on the other side of the park.

Were a person to be seriously harmed by a translocated animal in its new location, the agency that brought it there could be held partly liable. The Arizona Game and Fish Department settled out of court for $4.5 million after a bear they’d translocated mauled a young girl at a campsite.

Dave Garshelis has worked with humans and bears for almost forty years. I asked him, by phone, how he felt about translocation. “People think this is a kind thing to do, but I’m not sure it is all that kind,” he said. Often it’s sows with cubs that get into trouble, because they need the most food. “Here she is living in her home range, teaching her cubs where the foods are. Now all of a sudden you plop her down somewhere else that she’s completely unfamiliar with. With a whole bunch of other bears which she’s competing with for food. You’re injecting them into a social system they’re not familiar with.” When bear biologists from the state of Washington surveyed forty-eight U.S. wildlife agencies, 75 percent said they sometimes translocate problem bears, but only 15 percent believed it was an effective way to resolve the problem. It’s more often done in high-profile cases, when media attention has put the animal and the agency in the spotlight. Generally speaking, translocation is a better tool for managing the public than it is for managing bears.

The most promising candidates are young bears translocated early in their “criminal” careers. This is partly because yearlings are less inclined, or less able, to find their way back, but mainly because dumpster diving is a gateway crime. Next comes breaking and entering, burglary, home invasion. As garbage-eaters become habituated to humans, as they start to associate them with jackpots of food, the risk-benefit ratio shifts. Less perceived risk, dependable benefits. Why stop with the metal boxes in the restaurant back alleys? Why not get inside the big boxes in the hills with the enticing cooking smells? Since the end of hibernation, in April, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has had 421 calls about Pitkin County bears damaging property while going after people’s food. Most of these calls go to District Wildlife Manager Kurtis Tesch, whom Breck and I are meeting up with tomorrow.

Kurtis Tesch has bear stories, but maybe not the kind you expect. The things that stay with him are not the displays of strength or violence but rather the intelligence and occasional unexpected lightness of touch. The bear that unwrapped the foil on a Hershey’s Kiss. A bear that stood up, grasped a door on either side and pulled it from its frame, then carefully leaned it up against the house. “They’ll reach in and take things out of the fridge, like eggs, and set them aside without breaking any.”

Black bears are keeping Kurtis unusually busy this year. This was unexpected, because the spring was wet; human-bear conflicts are typically thought to intensify with drought, not with plentiful rain. But the year before was very dry, and Kurtis says he’s heard that drought spurs some plants to produce an excess of reproductive material, or “mast”—fruit, seeds, berries, acorns—and then less of it the following year. “They’re trying to spread their seed, thinking that they’re about to die off. And then when a wet year comes, they’re more concerned about growing.”

Breck volunteers that the general trend toward warmer temperatures also contributes, by shortening the length of the bears’ hibernation. In a 2017 study, he and six CPW biologists radio-collared 51 adult black bears and monitored the timing and duration of their hibernation, along with environmental factors. For every 1.8-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature, hibernation shortened by about a week. Based on current climate change projections, black bears of the year 2050 will be hibernating 15 to 40 days less than they are now. That’s 15 to 40 more days out on the landscape looking for food.

Food supply also affects hibernation. In a year of plentiful food, bears hibernate for shorter periods. For a bear that starts relying on human-sourced foods, every year is a plentiful year. Breck found that bears that foraged mostly urban areas hibernated a full month less than bears that foraged the natural landscape. Another concerning consequence of plentiful food is that reproduction rates rise. Black bear sows have a reproductive option called delayed implantation. Fertilized eggs become clusters of cells, called blastocysts, that loiter in the uterus over the summer. Whether they implant in it come fall—and how many of them do so—depends on the mother’s health and how well she’s been eating.

Breck steps down from the truck and walks to the edge of the blacktop. I assume he’s marveling at the view, but as I walk over I hear him calling out the names of bushes and trees growing wild around the house, the ones black bears feed on: serviceberry, chokecherry, oak. “Yup,” says Kurtis. “This is some of the best bear habitat in Colorado. We moved into their habitat. You know?”

The owners of the house have been out of town. The house-keeper, Carmen, discovered the break-in and called the police, who in turn called Kurtis. Carmen lets us in and takes us downstairs to the entry point: a floor-to-ceiling window in a bedroom with its own deck. She says it was locked, but bears can wedge their claws into any small gap in a window frame and pry the unit out. An interior screen window lies on the carpet. The wall-to-wall is white, but the bear left no tracks. Nor, Carmen says, did it knock anything over on its way upstairs to the refrigerator.

This bear reminds Breck of one that was breaking into Aspen homes back when his study was underway here. They called him Fat Albert. “He was just kinda laid-back. He’d gently open a door of a cabin, go in, eat some food, and leave. People would go, ‘Wow, he didn’t destroy my place at all.’ ” That’s why he was fat, and that’s why he was alive. There’s more tolerance for a bear like that. An aggressive bear that trashes the place or otherwise makes homeowners feel violated and in danger is very quickly going to be, to use Breck’s word, whacked. The upside, if it can be said there is one, is that natural selection favors the Fat Alberts. Aggressive bears are likely to be put down before they have much opportunity to pass on their genes.

With a growing percentage of Fat Alberts, will coexistence eventually become a possibility? Or even a policy? Could we live with bears in the backyard the way we live with raccoons and skunks? I posed this question to Mario Klip, a bear specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) in the Lake Tahoe region. Many people in his area already do, he said. Say a couple of homeowners find a bear under the deck. Rather than call Fish and Wildlife, they may call the Bear League, a local advocacy group. “They’ll send someone out to crawl under and poke it with a stick and get it to run off, and then help board up the space for you.” Klip practices coexistence with the BEAR League. “They are,” he points out, “filling a vacuum.” More and more people want nonlethal options for bears that trespass or break into houses. And not just Californians. Dave Garshelis works in rural northern Minnesota, where most people have guns and are allowed—encouraged, even—to solve their bear problems themselves. “I’ve been here thirty-six years,” Garshelis told me. “I can sense a sea change in attitudes to bears.” What would happen if wildlife managers did nothing, if they stopped destroying the recidivist bears? The fear is this: Those bears’ cubs will learn to break into homes, and ditto those cubs’ cubs. As break-ins escalate, tolerance erodes. As Garshelis put it, “It’s hard to be tolerant when there’s a bear in your kitchen.”