Why Colorado Bear Encounters Are Spiking This Year

Our lab-mix Argo saved us. It was 3 A.M. Middle-of-the-night barking isn’t entirely unusual in our house—a squirrel might do it — but the loud banging and tearing noise were certainly rare. That got me up and downstairs quickly. I saw the bear immediately. Its head poked through the now screenless kitchen window, looking curious and a bit more confident than I’d like. I stood in my underwear, only the sink between this massive cinnamon-colored black bear and me, yelling loudly, waving my arms in the air. Argo slowly retreated. The bear stared at me, looking slightly annoyed at the sudden presence of this erratic being standing between her and our refrigerator.

Finally, she backed away. By then, my wife and visiting parents had emerged. Our three-year-old daughter was turning four the next day—was it our homemade strawberry cupcakes that lured this creature?—and we were grateful she slept through the whole thing.

We watched a cub walk through the backyard, then another. The mama bear climbed up an aspen tree and then over our fence. The cubs followed, balancing along the top of the fence before dropping into the neighbor’s yard.

When we shared our broken window and destroyed screen story with neighbors, they were mostly unimpressed: Why would you leave a kitchen window open? With a child in the house? The bears are acting differently this year. It hardly snowed last winter, and with climate change causing unprecedented drought and natural food shortages, bears are being pushed closer to homes in search of something, anything, to store up fat before the next hibernation.

According to the Vail Daily, the police in Avon, Colorado, where I live, received 290 calls about bears over a six-week period this summer, with 47 involving property damage. Statewide, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is reporting a record-breaking year for human-bear conflicts, with more than 7,000 incidents. How is it only early September?

Human-bear conflicts, not to mention strategies for trash disposal, have been a problem for a long time in mountain towns. Our bears were never quite as desperate—or bold—as those Tahoe bears you hear about. But longtime locals I talk to say the bears’ behavior feels different this summer. There’s a cub around every corner, and everyone has a story. One bear entered a friend’s kitchen while a man made dinner, ate his food out of the skillet, and climbed back out through the window it had entered. Another bear scratched a man who surprised it in an apartment laundry room. Apparently Benderz Burgers had a break-in: a bear broke down the door looking for a smashburger. A woman on the bike path got tackled going downhill at 25 miles per hour, breaking both legs and her pelvis. The neighborhood swimming pool manager said a bear climbed the eight-foot metal fence and tore apart one of the gas grills.

So what’s a Coloradan to do? One woman, at a recent birthday party for a three-year-old at the Minturn Bike Park, caused a hubbub when she declared that the police had shot and killed the mama bear of two cubs, surely the one we had all seen in person if not on doorbell cams. This sent several partygoers — not the ones playing with sidewalk chalk—into a frenzy. Others were convinced shooting the bear was the only reasonable thing to do to keep their children safe. Another suggested leaving food in the forest for them to eat.

The mama bear tragedy, of course, turned out to be social media fiction. The deputy police chief of Avon assured readers of the Daily that bears had only been shot with beanbag rounds in the tush.

“We’ve used bean bag rounds several times this year,” he told the paper. “It’s not as loud as normal gunfire, but technically you are firing a shotgun. We’ve discharged them in homes—we’ll open a door up and shoot them in the rump to get them to leave the kitchen—we’ve used them in the trailer park, we’ve used them quite a few times.”

One thing we know for sure: climate change is making the West hotter and drier. More summers like this one will only make coexisting with bears more challenging. Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) urges the basics: Keep trash locked up, close windows (got it!), leave the hummingbird feeders empty. Keep your distance, especially around females with cubs.

The morning after our attempted break-in, I pedaled my daughter toward her school. I saw something moving in the bushes on the side of the road near a construction site. I slammed on the brakes as a very wet bear cub ran across the street feet from our bike, barely giving us a look as it strutted across. We watched it head toward some condos along the Eagle River. It sat down in the shade of a nearby yard. Then, thinking better of it, the young bear climbed over another fence and into the backyard.