by Vermont Fish & Wildlife Commissioner Jason Batchelder
In Stowe earlier this month, the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife authorized the killing of a bear that had grown dangerously comfortable seeking food around people from homes and businesses. If the past few years are any indication, by the end of summer we will have had to put down or provide similar authorizations for dozens more bears to end acute conflicts that threaten human safety.
No one wants this outcome for Vermont’s bears. But when Vermonters fail to put proactive coexistence measures in place before bears learn that our homes and villages are good places to find food, this is the predictable outcome. This challenge is not limited to Stowe or even to mountain towns. Except for the Champlain Islands, if you live in Vermont you live in bear country, and Vermonters are collectively failing our bears.
We say “collectively” because whole communities teach bears where to find food, not just individual households. It is tempting to blame one family’s birdfeeder or one business’s dumpster, but bears are more adaptable than this. Our neighborhoods need to be in lockstep taking down birdfeeders when the snow melts and keeping trashcans and totes stored inside until immediately prior to pick-up on trash day. And our downtowns need to present a unified front of well-secured dumpsters.
A bear that finds an easy meal when one house leaves their garbage out overnight will soon test other houses. Vermont’s bears mastered strategies like this over many years have now passed their knowledge on to multiple generations of cubs.
Bears are not at fault for these behaviors. Creativity, group learning, and tenacity are simply their nature. These are also the qualities that inspire our affinity and respect for bears. Humans are to blame when we collectively create situations that encourage bears to take risks and then fail to correct our mistakes quickly enough for coexistence to work.
Over the past several decades, our department’s approach to human-bear coexistence has centered on creating the conditions for our bear population to thrive and providing the information and assistance for Vermonters to voluntarily keep bears wild.
We conserve thousands of acres of remote bear habitat, place hundreds of “Keep Bears Wild” signs in communities across the state, partner with the nationally recognized nonprofit BearWise on print materials to share at workshops and community gatherings, and publish extensive coexistence resources online. We invite bear coexistence news coverage each spring and throughout the summer, support peer-learning networks on living in bear country, and oversee a sustainable, regulated bear hunt every fall.
Our biologists and game wardens annually field upwards of a thousand inquiries about living with bears, conduct hundreds of site visits to provide on-the-ground coexistence advice, and in serious cases wardens issue citations when bears are being intentionally fed. Even so, both the number and severity of bear incidents are escalating, putting both bears and humans at risk.
Today Vermont is home to as many as 8,000 bears, substantially more than in the past. But whether those encounters become conflicts has less to do with bear numbers than with what people do, or don’t do. Human behavior, and specifically our ability to make good on the shared responsibility of living in bear country, is the single most important factor.
Put simply, Vermont’s bear population is thriving and we need Vermonters to meet a higher standard as stewards of our bears. If we cannot change course together, then Vermont will continue to play out the grim adage: a fed bear is a dead bear.