Bears might have the keenest noses in the animal kingdom, but their stomachs are what usually tell them where to go.
And that can take them into some strange, dangerous, and even deadly places.
A week ago, Colorado Parks and Wildlife found a black bear dead inside a car in Colorado Springs. Apparently the 250-pound animals crawled inside the car three days earlier, got trapped, and died in the heat.
And Wyoming Game and Fish agents once baited a grizzly into a trap with a trail of M&M’s candy, retired biologist Mark Bruscino told Cowboy State Daily.
“He walked up that line of M&M’s and licked up every one,” said Bruscino, who retired from Game and Fish in 2013.
Feeding Frenzy
The Colorado Springs bear might have driven toward its ultimately fatal decision by hyperphagia. That’s a natural period of nonstop gluttony in last summer and early fall as bears try to pile on fat before retreating to their winter dens.
During hyperphagia, bears can gobble down 20,000 calories per day. They’ll take anything they can get but particularly crave food sources loaded with protein and/or fat.
Wildlife biologist Mark Jones of Buffalo worked with black bears back East. Calorie-packed food sources are readily available there, so eastern black bears can grow into 700-pound blimps.
As in Wyoming, eastern wildlife managers don’t want bears to become “food- conditioned,” or addicted to human-provided food sources, he said.
“It usually starts with dog food and garbage,” said Jones, who worked in bear research and management from 1992 to 2001, first with the University of Tennessee and then with the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission.
Buckshot-Dodging Grizzly
Bruscino recalled that one November years ago, Game and Fish was after a male grizzly that broke into two cabins and a guest lodge before he was finally captured and euthanized.
The lodge break-in was wild, he said.
The only person on the property at the time was the winter caretaker, who was staying in a house separate from the lodge.
Late one night, the caretaker was jolted awake by a ruckus in the lodge.
Thinking a human thief had broken in and was pilfering the lodge, the caretaker grabbed a shotgun loaded with 00 buckshot and went to confront the burglar, Bruscino said.
When the grizzly detected the man’s approach, it decided to escape by jumping through a window.
The half-awake, startled caretaker opened fire and missed catastrophically.
“He shot and missed the bear but hit the dishwasher (commercial dishwashing machine), so there were shotgun pellet holes in the dishwasher,” Bruscino said.
M&M’s, A Bear’s Demise
During one of the cabin break-ins, the grizzly swiped a huge jar full of M&M’s with a screw-on lid.
The griz took the jar up under some trees and managed to unscrew the lid and gobble all the M&M's, Bruscino said.
The bear’s fondness for M&M’s ended up being its fatal weakness, Bruscino said.
The bear had been trapped and relocated previously, so it was “trap wary" and efforts to catch it had failed, he said.
So, “We got a two-pound bag of M&M’s candy” and used that to bait a trap, with a trail of bit-sized candies leading to the main stash, Bruscino said.
Killing bears is one of game agents’ most hated tasks, but Game and Fish determined that the grizzly had become too food-conditioned and too accustomed to breaking into structures, he said
Black Bear Antics
Bruscino recalled black bears frequently getting into trouble as well.
In one instance, a man in Riverton came home to discover what he thought was his neighbor’s dog in his house, Bruscino said.
“He ran the ‘neighbor’s black lab’ out of his house, but then it climbed a tree,” revealing that it was actually a small black bear, he said.
On another occasion in Meeteetse, “a black bear entered a home and the guy living there had a bear tag, so he harvested it (legally),” Bruscino said.
Similarly, in August 2023, a black bear broke into the home of Thomas Bolkom and Seeley Oblander at about 3 a.m. in the tiny community of Luther, Montana, near the Montana-Wyoming state line.
Bolkom shot the bear to death with a pistol.
Bear Wanted A Roast
Jones said one of his favorite anecdotes from his career in North Carolina also involved somebody being rudely awakened by a bear.
A man in a rural mountain area was taking a daytime nap with the sliding glass door to the kitchen open, but a sliding screen door still closed, Jones said.
“He heard a commotion in his kitchen and thought his wife was rummaging in the refrigerator,” he said.
“He got up to see what was going on, and he found a relatively small black bear that had opened up the refrigerator trying to score a roast that was inside," Jones said.
“He started yelling and screaming at the bear, and it ran out of the house,” he said.
Apparently, the bear had slid the screen door open, walked inside, and then opened the fridge.
“They’re really skilled at using their claws” to pry things open, Jones said.
Not So Docile
There have been other cases of black bears getting caught inside buildings and chased out.
On the morning of Oct. 5, 2004, a black bear broke the front glass door of the Owenhouse Ace Hardware downtown on Main Street in Bozeman, Montana.
And in October 2015 a black bear ambled into Bozeman High from an open garage door near the football field. It wandered down a hallway with lockers until police chased it out of the building.
People might regard black bears as docile and apt to flee, Jones said.
But that’s not always the case.
He recalled two fatal bear attacks near the North Carolina-Tennessee state line.
In one attack a woman was killed, and a child was killed in the other, Jones said.
“Investigators determined both of those attacks were predatory,” meaning the bears were actively hunting people as food, he said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
