They climb through bedroom windows and open car doors. They sneak into restaurants, fire stations and vacation rentals. Across the country, black bears are foraging for food.
Human-bear encounters are on the rise this year in at least 15 states. Across the West, Northeast and Southeast, agencies received more bear-related calls than last year. In Colorado, reports have increased by as much as 200 percent, and in Utah, bears in cities have reached a record high.
Some calls report a sighting. Others involve bears breaking into homes, cars or chicken coops. Very rarely, the calls report attacks.
There are about 450,000 black bears in the United States. Most avoid people, only getting close when they are in search of food. But when these opportunistic omnivores succeed in eating human food, they will continue doing so and experts say, it is impossible to reverse the behavior.
As more people move into bear country, humans must adapt.
While Keryn Francisco and her son were fishing, a black bear broke through an open window to raid the fridge in their cabin in South Lake Tahoe, California. The bear had expensive taste, eating avocados, brioche buns, croissants, chocolate strawberries and tri-tip steaks.
It returned for seconds and then thirds, bringing the food to the porch to eat and leaving a mess behind. “He was living his best life,” Francisco said.
In California and across much of the West, human-bear encounters are increasing. Experts say environmental conditions are driving much of this year’s uptick by wiping out the black bear’s natural food supply.
Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Washington and Wyoming have cited drought as a factor in the increase. Officials in North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee said the same.
Arjun Dheer, California’s statewide black bear coordinator, said parts of the West had unusually low snowpack and warm, dry conditions that were followed by drought, early snowmelt and damaging late-spring freezes.
“Those conditions can reduce or disrupt natural foods like grasses, berries, fruits, acorns and other mast, causing bears to range farther and take greater risks around developed areas in search of calories,” he said.
Colorado, which saw its worst snowpack on record, has seen the steepest surge. Wildlife officials have recorded 10,019 bear reports so far this year, more than triple last year and more than double the state’s annual average.
In the past, John Livingston, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife public information officer, said, the impact was confined to only a few counties but this year it’s statewide.
Livingston, who is part of the Statewide Bear Working Group, said he was alarmed in July. The number of reports had surpassed all of last year.
“That’s when it’s like, okay, buckle up,” he said.
Typically the fall is when when bear encounters are most common, as bears prepare to survive winter hibernation.
The reports: A bear jumping on the tables of a restaurant. Exploring the inside of a ski lodge. Breaking into trucks and trash cans. Eating garbage and nabbing a bag from a fire station. Wandering into neighborhoods where they don’t typically go.
In Durango, a bear group posts photos showing what is left in the bears’ wake when trash is unsecured.
“We’re still in the thick of it,” Livingston said. “We’ve got another month and a half of really high levels of bear activity.”
Meanwhile, a growing population of humans and bears have spurred more bear encounters in the East.
One Connecticut black bear, known to officials as Bear 213 and to Simsbury neighbors as “White Paw,” had a string of encounters starting in 2022, when a resident spotted the bear approaching her door.
“He noticed me and very quickly came to investigate,” she wrote on a neighborhood Facebook group at the time, adding that the bear “was not easily deterred by three dogs going nuts on him.”
In the year that followed, the bear broke into two homes and a garage before wildlife officials put a geolocation collar around her neck to track her. Bear 213 eventually had a “rap sheet.”
Black bears were once nearly eliminated by European settlers. Reforestation efforts have since reestablished populations in at least 40 states.
Building homes and businesses closer to wild lands increases the likelihood of human-bear encounters.
While black bears’ natural diet is mostly plant-based, high-calorie foods like human garbage, bird seed and pet food are all things that are “attractive to bears,” said Chris Servheen of IUCN Bear Specialist Group. And once bears succeed in eating human food, they continue doing so and mother bears will teach the behavior to their cubs.
Bears have entered about 60 homes in Connecticut this year, said Jason Hawley, the leading bear biologist at Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
While many states use hunting to manage their black bear populations, Connecticut does not. Officials said it’s the only state with a notable bear population where hunting them is illegal.
North Carolina, New Jersey and New York extended the hunting season in recent years. Florida recently reintroduced bear hunting, and California increased the number of bears that hunters may kill.
In 2024, “White Paw,” also known as Bear 213, was seen with three cubs, according to a Connecticut bear report. Her behavior got bolder.
She broke into garages, porches, barns and sheds ripping open freezers and trash cans, eating frozen cookies and drinking apple cider. She was not deterred by people. She growled and lunged at them, scaring one resident and his 30-pound goldendoodle.
She entered a home with her cubs in June of that year and tried again in July. The next day, Hawley’s staff euthanized her.
Some bears become so comfortable around people that they pose a safety threat, Hawley said.
“Bears are just going to do this indefinitely,” said Dave Wattles, the black bear and furbearer biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. “Those bears that develop these more serious behaviors like home entries, unfortunately, they’re not just gonna stop that because they feel like it someday.”
Massachusetts has also seen an increase in bears entering homes, and Wattles suspects the bears learned the behavior in Connecticut.
Even in developed places like Massachusetts and Connecticut bears and humans have “minimal negative interaction,” Wattles said. “They’re not inherently aggressive towards people.”
Bear conflicts in which a person dies or is injured are rare. The most common cause is when a person surprises a bear at close range, prompting the bear to defend itself.
Recently, a 17-year-old awoke at 2 a.m. as a black bear entered her bedroom through a cracked window. Officials reported, she covered herself in blankets as the bear approached her bedside and sniffed her head. After making a noise, the bear huffed and scratched her stomach. She screamed and sat up, and the bear left through the window.
Colorado has recorded 10 bear conflicts this year. The last fatality was in 2021.
“I wouldn’t say, and I haven’t said that they are more aggressive this year or more dangerous toward humans necessarily. They’re just willing to cross lines,” Livingston said.
In August, Eagle County sheriff’s deputies responded to a crowd of about 40 people filming a bear and her cubs outside of an Eagle-Vail apartment complex.
A week earlier, a man had been injured near the laundry room of the same complex during a bear incident.
After dispersing the crowd, deputies yelled and fired non-lethal rounds to get it to flee to a nearby river. The bear charged and a deputy fired several shots, killing it.
“I think somewhere along the line people have gotten really comfortable with being around bears,” Livingston said. “Like we’re forgetting that wild animals are wild.”
Bears adorn the names and logos of cabins, restaurants, coffee shops and pizzerias across Gatlinburg, Tennessee, at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The national park is the country’s most visited and home to nearly 2,000 black bears with some that wander between the park and the city.
This year, like the rest of the Tennessee, Gatlinburg has seen an increase in bear-related calls.
“You have so many bears in such a small area,” said Janelle Musser, assistant black bear program coordinator at the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. “And then you add all those people, which means a lot of attractants like garbage.”
In 2023, Gatlinburg invested $3 million into more than 460 bear-proof dumpsters and later posted signs reminding the public that feeding bears is illegal.
Musser said the program is working but “experiencing some growing pains.” With the garbage less accessible, Musser said, bears are increasingly showing bold behavior to find food.
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Videos show bears breaking into cars, opening doors, and running through parking lots and shopping centers as bystanders watch amused.
“All these videos, they’re not funny. As bear managers, we look at them and they’re scary to us,” Musser said. “We are thinking, oh my goodness, unfortunately, we’re going to have to try to capture that animal and put it down.”
What we teach the bears from these interactions, Musser said, is “When I get food, nothing bad happens. And all the humans do is take a photo of me.”
One of their biggest sources of food now is also one of Gatlinburg’s hardest to educate: tourists.
Many visitors don’t know what to do to secure their trash or how to respond to a bear sighting. And there’s no singular park entrance booth to educate people.
Removing food and trash may not be enough to deter bears especially when they are highly food-conditioned and used to being around people, said Hawley.
As bears and humans more frequently encounter each other, experts agree that bears are not the problem. Humans must adapt.
“The bears have been there for thousands of years,” Servheen said. “You just moved here.”
Whether you live in bear country or are visiting, learn what to do when you encounter a bear. Secure food, garbage and recycling. And never feed or approach a bear.
BearWise, an outreach and education program dedicated to helping people live responsibly with bears has guides for home and outdoor safety, as well as safe ways to scare a bear.
Experts also recommend consulting local wildlife agencies for region-specific advice, including when and how to report bear activity.
Christopher Hacker contributed to this report.
About this story: To assess human-bear encounters, The Washington Post contacted officials or reviewed data on bear-related calls and reports in at least 23 states. The Post focused on states with larger bear populations, drought conditions or repeated news reports of bear activity. Agencies in 15 states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington and Wyoming — reported increases in call or report volume compared with the previous year or the corresponding year-to-date period. Some increases were bigger than others.
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