Not beary scary: FWC offers tips to keep yourself – and the bears – safe
Know what to do if you see a bear. KATIE PARK
With echoes of Yogi and Jellystone Park, the bumper sticker from the Naples Zoo urges you to be “smarter than the average bear.” To achieve that goal, you are urged to put your trash bin out in the morning, not the night before, keeping bears from investigating the tantalizing smells under cover of darkness.
That was one of the recommendations from FWC, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, when they held an event in front of the bear enclosure at the zoo in late May, ahead of the expected annual spike in bears encountering people.
FWC biologist Sarah Peltier pointed out that the Southwest Florida bear population has grown from fewer than 300 in the 1970s to more than 4,000 today, even as humans have greatly increased their dwellings in what used to be the bears’ turf.
“With more bears, there will be more human-bear interactions,” she said.
Mother bears with litters of cubs have come out of their winter dens, foraging for food, and with June, the bears’ mating season begins, starting the cycle all over again. Bears, said Peltier, are looking for over 5,000 calories a day, and in their natural state, have to get those from foods such as palmetto berries, termite nests and the occasional small animal.
“Their diet is 80 percent vegetable, 16 percent colonial insects (termites and ants), and 4 percent meat,” she said. “They flip over logs for bugs or small critters,” all of which takes basically all day. “It’s a lot easier for them to raid a trash can.”
Bears have the keenest sense of smell of any land mammal, according to the FWC bear brochure on their website, seven times more acute than a bloodhound and able to pick up the smell of food a mile away. If your area has attracted bears, the agency recommends a bear-resistant trash bin, as well as not setting it out the night before.
While Peltier spoke at the Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens, in front of the bear enclosure, an example of the “bear-proof” bin stood behind her inside the glass-walled space. Tantalizing bits of food placed on top of and near the bin perked up the nose of Toby, the zoo’s 435-pound male black bear. He sniffed, stood up next to the bin – an impressive sight you do not want to see on your morning walk – and eventually knocked the green bin over. The lock held, through investigations by both Toby and Anna, his female companion. Even though she weighs only 255 pounds to his 435, she rules the roost, as many human males will understand.
The bins are made with a lock that automatically comes undone when the container is turned upside down, but at least that morning, the bears didn’t figure that out. One model of the bear-resistant garbage bin, the Kodiak, sells for about $175.
Additional attractants for bears are barbecue grills, bird feeders, pet food – and pets. In bear areas, FWC recommends keeping dogs leashed, and not with one of the retractable leashes that could break or become entangled. Having items that smell good to bears on a screened lanai, Peltier pointed out, does not count as having them secured.
While people can be forgiven for focusing on the danger to humans in bear encounters, in truth, it’s the other way around. There are no known fatalities from bear attacks in Florida, and the only incidents have come when a bear was cornered or humans were between a mother bear and her cubs. The real danger is to the bear.
“We say, ‘A fed bear is a dead bear.’ Once they get the habit, they’ll keep coming back,” said Tim Tetzlaff, director of conservation at the Naples Zoo. And even if a marauding bear is “euthanized” – shot dead – others will come, if the attraction that brought the first bear there remains.
If you are threatened or attacked by a black bear, experts agree, do not run or “play dead.” Bears can run up to 35 mph, and climb 100 feet up a tree in 30 seconds. Stand up to your full height to be intimidating, speak calmly and assertively, and back away slowly. And if you have to, fight – humans represent a threat, not prey, to bears in Florida.
For more information on how to live with bears – or better still, live without bears in the neighborhood – the FWC has a pamphlet, “A Guide to Living in Bear Country,” available from the agency or on their website at www.myfwc.com. For this region, the number to call to report a “sick, injured, orphaned, or dead bear” or a nuisance bear, is 561-625-5122.
Mama black bear and cubs crossing a road in Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park earlier this week. (Catherine S. Blakespear / Used with permission)