Black bear complaints in Minnesota this year are at a decade-high and aren’t slowing down this late into the summer.
Complaints are usually more common in the spring when bears first wake up hungry from hibernation. So why are bears continuing to cause so much commotion this year? Because a major food source — wild berries — is scarce.
“Last year was I think the fourth-best food year we've ever had and the lowest bear complaints we have ever recorded,” said Andy Tri, bear researcher with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. "The DNR has been recording bear complaints since 1980, with this year being the highest number of complaints in a decade, and it’s mostly due to food.”
Tri said with a tough berry year, bears will be out looking for easy-to-access food sources, like garbage and bird feeders.
"The berry production just didn't yield hardly at all," Tri said.
"No juneberries and very few chokecherries. I haven't seen a blueberry in Itasca County all year. Just a few pockets up in St. Louis [County] is where I found any. The bears are hungrier, and it's just been constant all summer.”
Without those calories readily available in the forest as bears prep for hibernation, Tri explained, they'll will use their powerful noses to sniff out alternative food sources.
“Right now is when they kick into that hyperphagia mode, where they need to eat something like between 12,000 and 20,000 calories a day,” Tri said. “The starting point is the Michael Phelps training diet for the Olympics, and then it just goes up from there.”
This isn’t the first time a bad food year prompted an influx of bears, but that may only be part of the equation.
"There are some historical records of like, turn-of-the-century Duluth, where it's just like an influx of bears into town,” Tri said.
One example includes an incident on Aug. 18, 1929, when a 350-pound bear was shot after evading capture by lasso while inside the coffee shop at Hotel Duluth. The bear broke in through a window, reportedly drawn in by the smell of food.
Tri said bears migrate along historical routes, and those bears tearing into trash and bird feeders in the spring are different than the ones trying to get into human property now.
“We didn't have a lot of bears, you know, in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, that we do now. There were big statewide food failures and some of the bears moved out to the former prairies,” Tri said.
As opportunists, bears will use their strong senses of smell to sniff out food, and they will repeatedly come back if they find food sources.
Tri recommended securing garbage cans in a garage or other outbuilding and not using bird feeders in the summer. Other bear attractants include fish entrails, pet food and grease on outdoor grills.
Tri said an increasing bear population leads to more young bears on the landscape. Bear cubs den with their mothers over their first year before going out on their own in May and June, which is another tough time of year for bear foods.
"You get lots of teenage bears showing up in random places that we wouldn't expect, like the Union Depot in St. Paul,” Tri said.
Tri said even with a small bear population, conflict would still exist because of bird feeders and trash.
“If bears didn't cause problems or destroy property, we could probably maintain a population 10 times what we have," he said. "But that's just part of it. Human/bear conflict is just a byproduct of a healthy and resilient bear population.”
Tri said the bear population is increasing in the Bemidji area faster than it is in the far northeast part of the state. In 2010, Minnesota had a bear population between 10,000 and 14,000. Now, that number is closer to 17,000.
With the bear hunting season starting Sunday, Sept. 1, hunters are asked not to take down collared bears.
"We're doing a reproduction study, and it takes five years on average before bears reach that age of maturity where they can have their first little cubs,” Tri explained.
“And so if they're shot at [age] 2 to 4, we don't get that data point at 4 or 5, when they decide to have cubs. And so it's a lot of effort for not as much data as we possibly could have.”
The collared bears are in the Grand Rapids and Little Falls areas and are wearing cattle ear tags.
