Franchi, I think most bears in PA are pretty well conditioned to human encounters?
I'd have to agree with the 'conditioning' idea. Wildlife that is actively hunted has a natural and healthy fear of man. Gator attacks have increased dramatically...Geo
Well, gator attacks are not a big thing here in the Wisconsin Northwoods, but bears can be pests. Years ago, when a bear permit was free with a deer license, I used to try to stick a bruin with my bow and arrow, from a tree stand, over stale donuts, with zero success. Back then the bears were mostly taken by guys running them with Plot hounds and the like, and the bears knew that they were being pursued. I sincerely doubt that a bow hunter occasionally sticking one would have sent a message to bears in general to avoid people.
I always considered black bears to be big raccoons, albeit a fired-up coon could do damage to my hounds, but I figured; why hunt bears with a bow and arrow if there wasn't some risk? I had read about Saxon Pope and Arthur Young stalking and taking grizzly bears in Yellowstone Park in the 1920s without back-up guns, and I had seen the mounts at the Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco...so, What the heck?
I hunted bears in the 1980s, albeit black bears, until one overcast evening as I waited, hoping that the bear rustling around in the nearby thicket would come in and put his nose into my donut pile and
Viola! a bearskin rug. But no joy, shooting time elapsed, never actually saw the bear, and I climbed down into a dark woods to follow the trail to my vehicle...when I walked into a whole flock of ruffed grouse, that exploded and kept exploding in every direction and I thought that I was going to die, at least of a heart attack.
As it was, bear permits started getting so popular that the WI-DNR began charging for them and then rationed them on a lottery basis, and I lost interest, bear-less in this lifetime. Yet all those bears I never saw while hunting them became very visible around our lake cottage (30 miles south of Duluth/Superior) and even wandering in and about town, and increasingly so to the extent that the TV stations from Madison WI (a short 45 miles north of my farm on the IL/WI state line), regularly report bear sightings in the suburbs of Madison, all of which are documented by cell-phone cameras. The punchline being:
When the Northwoods or other bear habitat gets so overbuilt, as it is now, by urban sprawl and/or vacation lake cottages elbow to elbow, ringing every lake and along every river, the "conditioning" of bears to their human neighbors is an accomplished fact. I doubt whether anyone on this website can claim that he has not one obnoxious neighbor, be it a lawnmower at 0630 on Sunday morning...or you fill in the blank:_______________. Why should we expect bears to be better behaved than the neighbor's pit bull?
The black bears I see in the Northwoods are not bothersome but could be. I have watched a black bear walk within 30 feet of ParkerDog (my yellow Lab) as he sat on the back stoop of our cabin...each aware of the other, but minding his own business. We had a couple of coon-sized cubs up a tree down by the lake with the mother bear guarding the tree and I got within about 20 feet in the canoe (stupid is as stupid does--I forgot to charge the camera battery!) Black bears go with the territory, now. Why two cubs would climb a tree and bite a bow hunter is a puzzlement; why the hunter didn't put an arrow into the first one is an even greater puzzlement. Perhaps more bear hunters using dogs would put the fear of man back in the black bear gene pool...or maybe not.
Perhaps if I live enough I'll have bears gravitating south to my 22-acre forest on the IL side of the state line; the deer stands are in place, and I trust the big raccoons still crave out-of-date Crispy Creams.
Nothing stimulates the imagination more than one person we have never met, out of more than 300,000,000 Americans, getting shark-bit or bear-bit or alligator-bit. Investigation continues. EDM
