Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Why encounters between people, bears on the rise in Northern Nevada

bear

Eugene Garcia / AP

An orphaned bear cub struggles to survive as it walks alone along a mountain road impacted by the Dixie Fire in Plumas County, Calif., Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021.

Encounters with black bears in Northern Nevada neighborhoods and on roads are up significantly in recent months, with a summer of historic wildfires near Lake Tahoe likely to blame, the Nevada Department of Wildlife said.

Through Sept. 27, a total of 23 black bears were killed by cars this year in Nevada, 16 of them last month alone, said Ashley Sanchez, a spokeswoman for the agency. She said bears and other wildlife living around the basin had been displaced from Dixie, Caldor and Tamarack wildfires that raged near the Nevada border in Northern California.

With black bears eating more in preparation for hibernation, there has been a spike in bear reports in Douglas, Lyon, Washoe and Mineral counties and Carson City.

“The big issue we’re seeing right now is that their habitat is burning, the bear population is growing and they’re moving into neighborhoods because they are opportunistic and they’re food-driven,” Sanchez said.

“We just lay out this buffet for bears. There’s fruit trees, there’s garbage and all sorts of other attractants that humans leave out.”

Nevada is home to about 400 to 700 bears at any given time, Sanchez said. The number fluctuates as the animals roam in and out from neighboring California and Oregon, she said.

But when bears are in Nevada, their territory ranges from northwest of Reno to Walker Lake, some 100 miles southeast.

There are several measures people can take to discourage bears from coming around, Sanchez said. Among them: securing garbage in bear-resistant cans, picking fruit from trees, not leaving food in cars and using electric fences.

Bears might keep coming back if they find food, which can lead to human encounters and the euthanizing of nuisance bears, Sanchez said. And whether a bear is rummaging through trash or eating fruit that fell from a tree in somebody’s backyard, any bear sighting in a town or neighborhood should be reported to state wildlife officials.

Wildlife officials also trap bears in populated areas and release them back into the wild. Upon release, the bears are sometimes shot with rubber bullets and chased by Karelian bear dogs to encourage them to stay away in a technique called aversive conditioning.

“Our goal is to give it an unpleasant experience so it doesn’t feel comfortable coming back into a neighborhood,” Sanchez said.

Bear sightings should be reported to the Department of Wildlife, Sanchez said.

“It’s on all of us to keep bears wild,” she said.

Aversive conditioning, however, shouldn’t be confused with the state’s annual black bear hunt, which runs this year from Sept. 15 through Dec. 1, Sanchez said. The state sanctions an annual hunt of up to 20 animals. Hunters kill an average of 14 bears a year in Nevada.

Patrick Donnelly, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was “disgusting” that the hunt was allowed to continue this year. It should have been suspended to give bears a reprieve from the worst summer of wildfires in modern history, he said.

“They’re at the limits of what we can only assume to be their tolerance of these types of conditions,” Donnelly said. “We all live in air conditioning and swamp coolers. You know we have ways we can escape, but bears have nowhere to go.”

The Center for Biological Diversity was one of eight organizations to co-author a Sept. 8 letter to state wildlife director Tony Wasley and Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners Chair Tiffany East asking to suspend the black bear hunt.

The bears might have suffered from being exposed to smoke and ash, which could have a drastic impact on future generations of cubs, they said in the letter to state wildlife officials.

Sanchez said hunting “may actually alleviate the increased competition for habitat” and that more bears were killed by motor vehicles than hunters.

Every hunter is required to take an educational course before they’re given a tag and they must contact the wildlife department before a bear is harvested, Sanchez said. She added that while conditions for bears may not be ideal right now, part of wildlife department’s mission was to ensure the overall bear population remained robust in the state.

Donnelly, however, called the hunt more of a “moral issue” than a management situation. Chasing bears “with dogs up trees and shooting them like fish in a barrel is immoral. It’s wrong.”

“Wildlife management in the state of Nevada exists to prioritize hunting,” he said. “We’re not at a point where that can be the priority anymore. Our priority right now needs to be climate adaptation and resilience for wildlife.”