They showed up at dawn one morning this week at Lake Tahoe’s Fallen Leaf Campground, wildlife officials looking for a bear sow and cub with a reputation for nonchalant visits to the tents.
The same bear had been trapped, tagged and run out of the campground with dogs and rubber bullets four weeks earlier in hopes of teaching her to avoid humans.
She didn’t learn.
In the middle of the night, as the busy Labor Day weekend approached, she swiped at a camper in his tent, injuring his arm. Officials from the California Department of Fish and Game and the USDA Wildlife Services decided they had to act before hundreds of people, and pets, showed up for the holiday.
“I think that was a train wreck waiting to happen,” said Jason Holley, Department of Fish and Game wildlife program supervisor.
With the aid of hounds, seven trackers quickly treed the bear and her cub, tranquilized and trussed them and took them to a Fish and Game facility in Rancho Cordova. If DNA testing shows they got the right bears, both will be euthanized.
After years of seeing one or two so-called “public safety bears” per year, officials have dealt with about 10 in the Lake Tahoe basin this year.
“It’s quite an increase this year in public safety issues,” said Holley.
Wildlife officials tread a fine line.
On the one hand, they’re obligated to protect the public from bear attacks. On the other hand, many members of the public side with the bears.
Campground kiosk workers referred to the trackers as “the bear killers” and blamed the incident on the camper.
Bear-human conflicts often are as much the product of human misbehavior as bear misbehavior. People in the campground where the bear injured the man had left food around, possibly in the tent. The DNA testing will be based in part on saliva from a yogurt cup that the bear or cub chewed on.
“People, first of all, need to be held more accountable,” said Ann Bryant, who founded Tahoe’s BEAR League 12 years ago last week.
Her group now answers calls around the clock from people who’ve had cabins and homes broken into by bears, as well as from people who want to know how to prevent that.
There are up to 500 bears in the basin.
More bears are having larger litters, a sign they are getting plenty to eat — from the rising number of humans in the region. The bears have learned people have high-calorie food. The people haven’t learned to keep it away.
“The bears have evolved. Now we have to evolve,” Bryant said. “They’re smarter than we are.”
Even though an increasing number of Tahoe basin homes have bear-proof garbage cans, the bears are still finding it easy to get into homes through single-pane windows and hollow-core doors, she said.
The BEAR League gets hundreds of calls a week, sometimes after law enforcement directs people there.
It irks the Fish and Game officials whose job it is to manage the bears that so many calls go to the league, though they laud the league’s education efforts.
Because of escalating bear interactions, the department created a full-time bear biologist position in 2009.
That biologist, Cristen Langner, participated in capturing the bears at Fallen Leaf Campground. From there, she headed to Sunnyside, where she was investigating a vacation home break-in.
The home address sign is a bear cutout. Numerous bear decorations are inside and out.
“Kind of ironic, huh?” said John Sakrison of Menlo Park, the homeowner.
“People love the bears up here,” he said.
It leaves Sakrison conflicted about what to do about the bear that broke in, went into his upstairs kitchen and wreaked havoc. Given the violence of the break-in, he could request a depredation permit — which would allow him to have the bear killed — but wonders how the neighbors would react.
“It’s a tough call,” he said. “What do you tell your 9-year-old daughter?”
After the break-in, Jimbo Nicholls, the maintenance contractor for the subdivision, cleaned up and boarded over the broken door.
He’s seen about 20 break-ins in the 400-home subdivision this summer — including four in one night on one street.
“Usually they go right to the refrigerator,” he said. “That’s their first step.”
For those who don’t want to kill bears, the most effective aversion tactic appears to be electric fencing, endorsed by the BEAR League, Fish and Game and users like Ken Volz.
“It just zaps ’em,” said Volz of Carnelian Bay. “A couple of times and the problem goes away.”
Maybe.
Langner thinks the problem may be as long-lived as bears who have learned as cubs that humans keep lots of food around.
They can live 30 years.
“It’s almost like a drug addict,” said Sakrison. “Once the bear’s into the stuff (human food and garbage), he’s no longer a bear.”
