I live in NW Montana and bears, both black and grizzly are fairly common. I have never had a problem with bears on my property because there is no reason for them to hang around. I don’t leave my garbage out, I don’t have bird or squirrel feeders, and I don’t have chickens or livestock. I have a dog and he keeps the bears away from the fenced-in garden during the day, but they usually don’t get that far anyway.
Once the bear has learned your house has food he/she will keep coming back for a while. Eventually they will learn there’s no point in coming around and will move on, but in the meantime I would carry a firearm when you’re outside and bear spray in case you encounter one during one of your hikes. Black bears are fairly easy to scare away, but a startled sow with cubs may decide to charge you as a warning. You can try using the air horn as a deterrence, but it will take multiple blasts for them to get the hint, and if you still have bird feeders around your house they will just wait you out.
Yeah, ‘neighbors’ had bird feeders. Bears climbed up to the second story deck to get at them.
I have had to use a large caliber either hand gun or rifle to scare persistent Black Bears away. They just sit, and like you say, wait you out. I’ll shoot into a tree near them.
I have heard the moth ball thing. I am afraid my little dogs would grab one while they are out with me. They are never out alone.
Someone told me used cat litter spread around is a repellent. Never tried it.
We have electric fence around the pea patch to keep out deer, not sure it would impede a hungry bear.
Fwiw, it’s been an insane year for bears in the mid-Atlantic. I’ve seen six in the Shenandoah valley in the past week. My theory was that last year was a baby boom year for black bears. They’re very shy and will usually take off at the slightest sign of humans. ETA if you have a bear that’s gotten used to people it might be time for a game warden to trap and move her. Call it in when you have an encounter.
Up in the Endless Mountains we used mothballs (nothing – not even the usual farm dogs – ever ate any that we noticed; it was the smell that worked) and a couple cousins rig lines about bear-high with noise-making devices (usually pie pans) attached almost like you would for zombies approaching after the apocalypse. But to be honest, mostly we just shoot them.
What’s happening is that hunting bears is both difficult and many see it as unrewarding. The harvest rate in Virginia for example is somewhere around 12%. To keep populations level, the rate should be much closer to 20-25%. What has happened is that West Virginia hunters had been able to keep populations in check and confined to the mountains up until the 70s, but eventually couldn’t keep up. Once the population pushed out from the Alleghenies and grew in Virginia, they didn’t have enough hunters who were skilled enough or interested enough at black bear hunting to keep the population in check. They harvest about 2000 a year out of 17000 bears but they give out 36000 permits. West Virginia as an example, harvest about 3000 a year out of 13000 and we’re still seeing expanding populations. There’s not a really good solution. Virginia probably needs to open up dog hunting to out of staters who still have hound-hunting cultures and maybe that will help, but honestly, hound-hunters are a dying breed. Keeping bear dogs is expensive and time consuming.
Bottom line on bears though is that the cat is out of the bag. There’s really no reason to think that their population is not going to continue to expand and expand exponentially. A mom has 2.5 cubs every two years and lives to about 20. That’s a lot of cubs she’s throwing out into the world and there really is no natural population check and the hunting check can’t keep up. In the 80s, they never came out of the mountains, now they’re everywhere and pushing further into urban areas every year and once they get over fear of urban places, the suburbs are going to be a smorgasboard for them. I look for many more human-bear conflicts on the East Coast in the coming years and it wouldn’t surprise me if they become the next East Coast nuisance species.
I crush the mothballs with a hammer. And then grind it in to the steps to the shed.
A funny story. One time, years ago when the shed door got ripped off, I ‘replaced’ it and then dropped the bucket of my tractor down on it to hold it in place for a temporary fix.
Next day I tried to start the tractor but the battery was dead. My jumper cables where in the shed, that I had blocked off with the tractor. Oops.
Fun trivia question: which two states have bears on their flags? Almost everyone knows that California is one, but Missouri stumps a surprising number of people.
I’ve lost a few bird feeders to bears in eastern PA.
My process now is to take them down for two to three weeks and keep an eye out for scattered trash cans on trash day to see if the bear is still in the area; I think my neighborhood is too small a wooded area to support a bear and they are just traveling through in search of a territory.
I then put out one or two cheap feeders to test, then put the out expensive SquirrelBuster stuff if the cheap ones survive.
If bears are an ongoing problem it seems the only real alternatives are to remove the feeders during warm weather and only put them out while bears are hibernating, or to install a bear-proof pole but I’m not ambitious enough for a project like that.
If we accept this prediction as valid, and I’ve little reason to doubt it, what’s the solution? Would you personally support the hiring of professional hunters? A strictly regulated, limited number of kills would be allowed per year concentrated on the most troublesome specific animals. Culling and processing would be paid for by the county/city with the meat donated to local families in need. If the hunters wish to pay for the taxidermy out of their own pockets, they can keep the trophies/hides and do with them as they will. I can certainly understand objections to this program but when combined with public education about how homeowners can create a bear unfriendly neighborhood, it’s probably the most effective, efficient option IMHO.
We leave ours intact and sort of make a perimeter around the buildings dropping one every 6-10 inches. Two normal boxes are enough to do the house and yard and they seem to last/work about 8 months. Great-uncle Kopek used to put a full block (like you would hang in a closet) outside the door of the root cellar as well.
I think the solution is that you learn to live with them, just like alligators in the south. Mostly they will just be a nuisance and every now and again someone will die, but it will be rare enough that it won’t stoke too much public outrage.
I guess you could put in bounty systems or allow easier ways to hunt them like with dogs or bait. (West Virginia was able to stabilize bear populations in four counties by increasing the bag limit, allowing longer seasons and allowing dog hunting - of course, this led to hunters moving from other areas into those four counties and increased bear populations in surrounding counties due to less pressure.) The long-term trend on hunters though is that they are decreasing by huge amounts. Hunting has long been the domain of demographics that are dying and nothing is going to change that. Professional hunters would be the target of legislators and rights groups and politically not feasible along much of the East Coast. I guess if the numbers got high enough that you started having weekly deaths maybe people would change their tunes, but I grew up in a county with a population of about 500-1000 bears pretty close to max carrying capacity and in my 40 years I never heard of anyone getting mauled, so it’s rare enough that even in max biological capacity I don’t think you’ll get enough outrage to really change the political equation.
Dog hunts. Even if you don’t always kill at the end of the hunt, but you tranq and remove, the bear has had a thoroughly unpleasant experience with dogs. I’ll have to look for the article I read about it, but in areas where they allow this bears are dog averse and more people averse. This mean that there is less interaction with population centers.
My tried and true solution to most any wild, four legged critters is acquiring a “Billy Bass”. Motion activated thing comes alive and starts singing. Want to watch a bear jump right out its skin?
They’re not weather proof though so without a roof and some sort of protection from the weather they don’t last more than a season.
I’ve tried every sort of critter deterrent known to man but Billy Bass or one of his cousins works every time.