Believe it or not, punch them in the nose. Unless it’s standing - eight feet is a bit of a reach.
Story from a ranger camping on the tundra. Rifles are kept outside to prevent sweat-caused jamming. He woke up and crawled out of his tent to find a curious Polar bear standing on his rifle. He did haul off and punch it in the nose. Since the animal was only curious and not stalking, it worked, but even he knows how lucky he was that day.
We have/had a bear issue in some training areas, to the point that bears are actually pulling rucksacks that soldiers are using as pillows, and running away with them. Dammit Yogi!
A friend and I were wilderness camping one summer in a season that was apparently bad for berry growth, so bears were foraging for food farther than usual. And one morning I peeked out of the tent to see a mother bear and two cubs examining our food supplies some distance away. We had taken the standard precaution of hanging most of our food on a line between two trees, but Mama Bear was interested in the other stuff, and even managed to partially open a can with her teeth.
They pretty much ransacked the food site, but didn’t come near our tent and eventually wandered away. They came back the next morning and more or less repeated the process, but again, never really bothered us, though I must admit I was more than a little concerned. I became all the more concerned when I saw what happened at the campsite across the bay. The same bears had completely demolished the campers’ tent, possibly because they had been foolish enough to keep food in there. The campers weren’t hurt, but they got in their canoe and got the hell out of there fast.
No doubt they reported the encounter because a couple of park rangers armed with rifles and a tranquilizer gun showed up at our campsite later. They said they would set themselves up at the campsite across the bay, but by this point we were happy to have them around and asked them to stay with us. The plan was to tranquilize Mama Bear and capture the cubs and take the lot of them far north to an unpopulated area.
The rangers cooked a very aromatic steak over the campfire to attract the bears, and sure enough, back they came, Mama Bear and the two cubs. This time, instead of peering out at them out of the tent, there were four of us standing there facing them down as Mama Bear and the cubs circled around.
Now I don’t know how typical this is, but what happened at this point is that Mama Bear suddenly reared up on her haunches and roared, clearly in attack mode. For whatever reason, the guys with the guns abandoned the tranquilizer plan and shot her. I have to say it was the most horrifying thing I have ever experienced and it left me rattled for weeks afterwards. The good news is that we were told later that the cubs were safely captured and transported north, and seemed to be old enough to be able to look after themselves.
Bears showing “threatening behavior” (raising up on hind legs, barking, bluff charging) is purely intimidation behavior that they use on each other in disputes over territory or females; this is akin to a male gorilla beating its chest or a chimpanzee screaming. If a bear tends to attack in a predatory fashion, they don’t announce the attack, they just charge, and the odds are that you will never see or hear them until it is too late to respond. And while it is sometimes necessary to eliminate an too-habituated bear in the name of public safety or thin bear populations due to unchecked proliferation, in this case I’m a little horrified that not only did the previous campers essentially attract the bear through their careless food habits but the park rangers deliberately baited the bear sow and then were somehow surprised that she responded to the bait with enthusiasm. It sounds like the rangers were not very familiar with bear behavioral cues and panicked.
Relocating bears await from human campsites and populations doesn’t really work because bears have very capable navigation sense and will return to their territory instinctively. Sows have actually been shown to divide up their territory among female cubs, while young male bears will roam across territories until they are sufficiently powerful to challenge the primary male for dominance (again, typically through displays of aggressing rather than actual fighting, although male grizzly bears have been known to fight to the death in a contest between a coming young male and an aging dominant bull). Relocated cubs have a somewhat better chance insofar as they aren’t tied to a specific area but may be chased away and into populated areas by more dominant bears. The lack of predators means that bear populations have grown while habitat has been consistently impinged upon by human encroachment, so human-bear encounters have become more frequent despite the normally reticent behavior of bears.
Stranger’s statistics above are good to know. However, around here, if you see the bear, you assume it is an habituated bear. Otherwise, you won’t see them.
The point has been vividly made with wolfpup’s post that habituated bears act in different ways to those that are completely wild. Living in bear country in the forest greatly increases my chance of having an encounter. Because the likelihood of running into a bear in my circumstances is high, and that bear has probably become habituated, I will continue to follow the advice of my local Fish & Game folks – which is to make noise while hiking around to give them a chance to leave the area. If I encounter a bear, my plan remains to back up slowly and avoid eye contact if the bear does anything other than immediately retreat.
wolfpup, I’m glad things ended well for you and sorry the bear was killed, but it’s the almost inevitable outcome of bears that are habituated. I get really frustrated when I learn my neighbors are being careless with their trash, compost and barbecue grills. It’s always the bears that pay the price.
You know, all these years later, I’ve thought the same thing. I think they did panic. I never really understood why they didn’t use the tranquilizer gun. It sounds like the motivation behind a lot of shootings in general – if you have a gun, and you feel your life is in danger, you use it. The only possible justification I can think of is that they may have felt (probably incorrectly) that this bear was a long-term danger to campers.
Α few years ago, a couple kayaking down the Hulahula River through ANWR stopped to cook and eat dinner, got back in the kayak and tootled on down the river to set up camp for the night. A day or few later, a passing rafter spotted their ravaged campsite, their bodies being guarded by a grizzly.
They did everything right. They were veterans of the wild lands, had their food in barfcons and a rifle in the tent. But the north slope area is a tad sparse pickings for a bear.
Side note: grizzlies are Ursus Arctos – the first is the Latin word for bear, the second Greek. So they are bear bears.
*In Alaska, about six people a year are injured by bear attacks, Bartley said. Two-thirds of them are hunters who surprise bears in the wilderness. Every other year, on average, somebody is killed, usually by a brown bear, he said. Usually the bear is defending itself after being surprised or is protecting its young or a fresh kill.
That’s really not much, Bartley said, considering there are people all over Alaska’s bear habitat, along with 35,000 brown bears and three times as many black bears.
“If bears wanted to eat you, they would. We’d lose one a day,” he said.
On the other hand, hundreds of bears are killed every year by people defending life or property, Bartley said. Such killings always increase after a widely publicized killing by a bear, he said.
“Quite frankly, there’ll be a spike after this,” he said.
Bartley could remember very few unprovoked fatal attacks by bears in Alaska – one on a camper in Hyder in Southeast in the 1990s, another on a solo kayaker in Glacier Bay in the 1980s. A child was killed by a brown bear in King Cove a decade ago, though in that case people fleeing into nearby brush may have triggered a chase response, he said. *
Anybody who goes into the backcountry alone or in a small group accepts the fact that they face potential hazards beyond the control of civil protections. That far fewer people die of bear attacks than mass shootings in public places tells you everything you need to know about the relative hazards.
Interesting story. But did they change their clothes after cooking and store cooking clothes in the Bear Canister? That’s a thing you have to do, as well.
Black fight back
Brown lie down
White you’re fucked
I forget the town (very small town, one of the most northern towns in the world, requires all residents to carry a rifle (I think…doubt a handgun is sufficient) and everyone leaves their doors (cars and homes) unlocked so you can dodge into one if a polar bear comes through (which apparently is not an uncommon thing).
Male cats will kill a litter of kittens in order to get the female back in heat so they can mate. You see it most with big cats in Africa but your domestic tabby isn’t so different and they will do the same given the chance. That said I do not think they eat the cubs/kittens.
If you look at the link I provided above, it seems bears are getting wise to bear canisters and will either smash them open or in some cases manipulate them open.
Perhaps it would be wisest to hang the humans from the tree and leave the food on the ground.
Yes. The doors unlocked I saw in Churchill and Arviat (they also leave their snowmobiles running outside stores/restaurants but that is due to the weather.
Churchill also has a «Bear in town» siren. They also use it for the 10pm curfew. Some nights I was walking back to our building from the update brief and the siren would go off and I would think to myself «Oh, PLEASE be ten o’clock!»
This was thirty year ago. I’m not sure the need for canisters had been recognized yet, never mind whether they were available. Perhaps his incident was a data point.
When I visited Churchill, where polar bears are a common problem, I heard this word of advice.
Polar bears typically eat seals (although the will eat anything). The catch the seal and grab by the neck it in their jaws, then shake it to break the neck. then it cannot move, so they can finish dinner at their leisure.
So if you are caught in the open by a polar bear, lie face down and put your hands over the back of your neck. You will live an extra five seconds while the bear bites your hands off first before he kills you like a seal.
That sounds an awful lot like a ranger’s answer on how to tell a black bear from a grizzly bear. 'If he’s chasing you, climb a tree. A black bear will climb the tree after you, a grizzly will simply tear the tree down."
That is like that lengthy story of the hunter who pisses off the bear, who allows the hunter to escape in exchange for sodomy. The hunter seeks revenge with ever increasing firepower, fails every time and is sodomized for his release, until at last the bear says, “I sense that you are not coming here for the hunting.”
