When a renter moved into a Lake Tahoe cabin this winter, he expected to have the place to himself.
But a well-known black bear in the area, known as Rose, had other plans for the home, having already settled into her new den in the home’s crawl space.
“As soon as he moved in, he started hearing babies crying under his floorboards,” said Anne Bryant, the executive director of BEAR League, a Tahoe-area nonprofit dedicating to keeping bears “safe and wild.” The renter called the group to help check on the noises he was hearing, and they soon confirmed it was Rose and her new cubs.
The renter is now gearing up to spend the rest of the winter with his four furry roommates.
“He’s being very protective,” Bryant said of the renter, whom the group isn’t identifying to help protect the bears’ location. “He’s like the papa bear.”
Bryant and her group are now helping the man adjust to his new guests, having set up cameras to monitor the bears, for both their safety and that of the home, Bryant said. Video from the group captured the tiny cubs crying, feeding and cuddling with their mom, but mostly the family sleeps.
Although the nonprofit will help residents remove bears from crawl spaces — a location that has become increasingly enticing for hibernating bears — after cubs are born, they need to stay in a warm, safe place to survive. Bryant expects the family will remain in the crawl space until about April.
“It happens every winter,” she said. Some residents are less accepting of the situation. This man, however, has embraced it, so much so that he already has named the cubs: Echo, Oakley and Storm.
Bryant estimates they’re almost a month old now.
The cameras help the nonprofit ensure that the mama and cubs are safe and not too close to wires or stuck in netting, both situations they’ve dealt with, Bryant said. But they also help make sure the bears don’t do too much damage to the home, such as breaking pipes, tearing up insulation or shredding heat ducts (also all things that have happened).
“We can’t prevent all the damage,” Bryant said, “but we can prevent something major by watching them.”
The group is monitoring one other bear family in another crawl space, but in past winters they often monitored more. The group watched five mama bears in the Tahoe area last winter. Recently, the group has also been getting more calls about situations involving bears in Southern California, Bryant said. Though they typically only operate in the Tahoe area, a few of their members went to Altadena to help a homeowner struggling to evict a 550-pound bear from underneath his home.
But their message to homeowners who live near the mountains is the same no matter the ZIP Code: “If you live in bear country, you’ve got to secure your crawl space,” Bryant said.
One reason she’s happy to be monitoring Rose and her cubs this winter is because the bear had two offspring last year — in another family’s crawl space — but both cubs died after they were hit by cars.
It was a bit of a surprise to find Rose with cubs again this winter, Bryant said, because black bears typically don’t reproduce in back-to-back years. But she said it’s been great to see the family together.
“They’re all doing great,” Bryant said. “They will come out in April … and we hope she keeps them away from the highway.”
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