NETT LAKE- After last summer’s severe drought, there are likely no creatures happier to see this year’s bumper crop of berries than the black bears who count them among their favorite foods.
When the berries are good, the bears typically behave themselves, spending their time foraging in the woods rather than raiding bird feeders and garbage cans. Indeed, bear complaints are down markedly this year, according to Jessica Holmes, the DNR area wildlife manager in Tower.
But that hasn’t been universal in the area.
Bear sightings have been a cause of concern for some at Nett Lake this summer, and that has raised questions about whether the changes at the nearby Vince Shute sanctuary could be playing a role in the increased bear activity in the village.
The recent bear activity has longtime Nett Lake resident Gordy Adams on alert.
“They’ve been coming back up here to the village and just getting into garbage and yards and everything,” Adams said. “I myself, personally, we’ve had three different bears here in our yard here in one day.”
The third bear was the biggest and most disruptive of the three, Adams said.
“This guy was huge,” he said. “He had to be a good 300–400-pound bear that was getting in the back end of my pickup. I put my aluminum cans back there, and he tore up all the aluminum cans looking for stuff.”
Adams said he hadn’t seen any bears during the daytime for the past couple of weeks, but he said he’s seen them toward dusk. “They’ve been coming around in the evening and get my dogs barking out there,” he said.
He said his daughter lives next door to him and has also seen more bears this year than normal. Adams said he hadn’t talked to others about it, so he wasn’t sure if other Nett Lake residents were experiencing the same thing.
The Timberjay contacted Bois Forte officials via email requesting to talk with someone familiar with the issue but did not receive a response. An individual who works for the tribal government who spoke off the record with the Timberjay did say there had been more bear activity in the area this year.
Adams said he had three young children staying with him that he worries about.
“I don’t let them go outside alone anyways, but now I’m even more wary of where they’re at,” he said. “They’re not allowed to go to the edge of the yard because they’ll just sit right at the edge of the yard and wait for people to go inside or something.”
Sanctuary bears?
There’s been a longstanding concern in Nett Lake, Adams said, that the Vince Shute sanctuary a little less than four miles away could be contributing to the bears being more comfortable around humans, making them less fearful of coming around residences in Nett Lake.
He also alluded to the sanctuary’s limited open schedule this year due to staffing issues. With the sanctuary open to the public only on Saturdays and Sundays, he wondered if the bears were only being fed on those days. A lack of food at the sanctuary, he reasoned, would make it more likely that the bears would wander into Nett Lake looking for food.
American Bear Association Executive Director Steph Horner, who oversees sanctuary operations, responded to those concerns on Tuesday.
“We’re feeding the bears seven days a week from sunup to sundown like we always have for 27 years now,” Horner said. “None of that has changed. It’s the same food that’s going out.”
Horner said she made the decision to open to the public only on the weekends because with limited staff and volunteers she wanted to make sure enough food was going out and that it was being done safely.
“I didn’t feel like we could be open to the public and feed the bears properly,” she said.
Having stepped in when the director hired to replace her abruptly quit in early June, Horner has been scrambling ever since to assemble a cadre of volunteers to supplement the few paid staff and interns on hand to keep the operation going and still provide the public with limited viewing hours.
“There are about eight of us who are on the ground during the week and then that jumps up to 12 to 15 people on the weekends,” Horner said. “We are fully staffed to capacity as far as feeding, so that is not a concern for me at all.”
The sanctuary isn’t the sole source of food for the bears, either. They’re wild bears that forage for food in the wild like any other, but in the summer, they supplement their diets with the food the sanctuary provides. During last summer’s drought, the bears were more dependent on the sanctuary because there was far less of what they normally eat in the surrounding woods. The opposite is true this year.
“I’m seeing more berries on bushes and trees than I think I ever have up here other than one other year,” Horner said. “There’s been a prolonged period of natural food that’s been available this year.”
That’s good for the bears, but Horner noted it could also bring them into closer contact with people.
“If you have those plants that bears like to eat in your yard or just on the edge of your property, they’re absolutely going to be taking advantage of that,” she said. “We live in the middle of the woods in bear country, so bears potentially may use your yard as a travel corridor to be from one berry patch to the next.”
And as they’re traveling, anything that could potentially be a food source for them is worth investigating, Horner said.
“Things like bird feeders can attract bears, trash, if you feed your pets outside, if you have a chicken coop and the food is just out and about, bears are going to investigate those things. Just having bears out and about exploring natural food sources combined with some of the stuff that we forget to clean up will definitely create more visibility of bears in an area.”
Horner also said that sanctuary staff have always worked to make the bears that come to the sanctuary feel wary of humans when they are not in the two-and-a-half acre safe zone, or magic circle, surrounding the viewing platform where they are fed.
“When we see bears outside of that two-and-a-half acres we do negative reinforcement,” she said. “We yell at them, we honk air horns, and if the bears do not leave fast enough we scream our heads off like crazy people to get them to be afraid of people outside that boundary.”
Peanut, a 32-year-old bear that’s been coming to the sanctuary since it opened, is a prime example that the technique works, Horner said.
“She knows the drill. She’ll slowly walk up to that boundary as if to say ‘Well, you can’t yell at me yet,’ and then when she gets over that line she suddenly scurries into the woods,” Horner said. “Because of negative reinforcement, we hardly ever see a bear near our cabins or in the parking lot, or even where we store the bear food. Essentially, our goal is to terrify them, to remind them that people outside of that special feeding area are to be feared. This is what has allowed us to be successful for 27 years.”
Horner said she also talked to some Bois Forte tribal council members when she came back on board and asked them to spread the word that the bears were still being fed as usual. And she said that the sanctuary has always looked to have good relationships with their Nett Lake neighbors.
“We had some of the council members out here last year for the first time in a while and I was able to meet with several of them personally,” Horner said. “It’s something I want because instead of calling other people I would love for them to call me and ask me those questions.”