I made a mistake and left the (detached) garage door open last night. Our local bear got in and ate some dry dogfood and went through the trash. I want to discourage this behavior in the future! I plan to take all the trash somewhere else (the local grocery, where we are regular customer, shouldn’t mind me using their dumpster), and I’ve cleaned up all the spilled dogfood, so if he gets in again the cupboard will be bare, but should I:
a) call that good enough
b) dump some of the dogfood somewhere else (in the open space nearby) so he won’t think our garage is the local dining hall
c) something else
One other idea. I used to live in a 4 story house with the bedrooms at the top and the garage at the bottom. Many a night I would lay in bed wondering whether I had closed the garage door or not. I got this device that has a sensor to detect whether the garage door was open or closed. I put the receiver by my bed so I always knew when I went to sleep whether the door was open or closed. From that point on I never left the door open.
Walking into an open garage where there is a food source isn’t very bold. Bears live close by with people in lots of places, but you need to make sure they don’t get habituated to humans as a food source.
No. The o.p. clearly lives in an area where bears are common (i.e. he’s not freaked out by this), and the bear took the opportunity to find an accessible stash of food, which they’ll do, being, as they are, essentially big omnivorous eating machines. Bears are very curious and they can be destructive, but it is fairly rare that they’ll break into a structure unless there is a clear indication of something yummy. Telemark’s advice is straight on; I would additionally recommend storing the food in a sealed container (to prevent smells from escaping) and put the garbage in bear-proof containers which are stored outside the garage. After a bear tries to open them once or twice and fails they’ll just leave it alone.
Relocating bears is rarely an effective strategy. First of all, bears are very good at navigation and males may travel over a couple hundred miles if the geography allows, so a bear relocated a few dozen miles may just return, and a bear relocated into a different environment may not have the foraging skills to survive in that environ, especially in competition with established bears. Second, if you remove one bear, you’re just leaving a vacuum for another to take its place. (Male bears have territory, but they’re not, strictly speaking, territorial; that is, they’ll allow territories to overlap mostly without conflict. Females, on the other hand, have defined territories that are usually ceded to them by their sows and are always looking to expand.) Third, unless the bear is actively threatening or has become so habituated to people that it is becoming an active nuisance (which is almost always the result of people being careless or stupid) it is best to just leave it alone and eliminate lures like trash and food. If it has reached that level, Fish & Game will typically “take” , i.e. kill the bear. (Black bears, Ursus americanus are in no way endangered in most areas and a limited amount of hunting and culling is necessary for responsible game management.) Generally speaking, people are far more a danger to bears (from junk food wrappers, road kill, habitat displacement, et cetera) than vice versa. I routinely (well, two or three times a year) camp in bear-infested alpine forests of the Sierras, San Gabriels, et cetera, and the only problem I ever had with a bear was when I stupidly left a pack with peanut butter and honey sandwiches sitting on a picnic table in an established campground; even then, I was easily able to drive off the bear and get my pack back just by yelling and throwing rocks.
If you want to actively dissuade a bear, you can put up an electric fence–it won’t hurt the bear, but the irritation is generally sufficient to make it go away–or wait around with a can of O.C. pepper spray; a single shot to the face is typically enough to keep the bear away from you for good. If you just make sure that there is nothing that is routinely available for them to eat around your house, though, they’ll just lumber on by and go bust up someone else’s open trash. Personally, I have far more trouble with raccoons and opossum than bear; those bastards never give up, even after you pop them in the rump with a Wrist Rocket-propelled marble.
If you’re ever in the Colorado Rockies, gimmie a shout.
As to the comfort of this fella with being around here, the people at the local restaurant regularly feed the foxes (darn them) and I wouldn’t be surprised if they leave out bear snacks as well. I’m hoping that will draw him away.
As I said, leaving the door open was a one-time mistake, and I’ll be careful not to repeat it.
While the bears will stay where they are being fed for now, this will habituate the bears to associate humans with food. They will spread out and lose their fear of people, leading to unfortunate encounters. They are making you less safe, not more safe.