A Grizzly in Denali National Park. Photograph by flickr/blmiers2.

After a series of bloody attacks this summer, officials are wondering if an expanding bear population will tolerate more humans in the wild.

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by Gordon Grice

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On June 28, 61-year-old Lana Hollingsworth was walking her dog in Pinetop, Arizona, when she spotted a black bear approaching. In an instant, the bear was on her, biting and clawing her head and chest. Hollingsworth’s neighbors, also out that evening, attempted to scare it away by yelling and honking their car horns. The bear, however, kept trying to return to its victim, who now lay bloody on the ground. Eventually, onlookers got the bear to leave the area, but by that time Hollingsworth had suffered severe injuries. Over the next four weeks, she underwent 11 operations. And then an infection set in — the bear’s saliva or claws likely carried pernicious bacteria. On July 25, Hollingsworth died of a massive brain hemorrhage.

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Two days after the attack on Hollingsworth, on June 30, authorities in British Columbia discovered the partially eaten body of 72-year-old Bernice Adolph. The remains were lying 300 yards from Adolph’s suburban home, in a wooded area riddled with bear feces.

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More attacks followed. Back in British Columbia, a grizzly bear mauled a 51-year-old man while he was out picking berries; he required skin grafts on his skull. In Alaska a grizzly critically injured two teenagers on a wilderness survival trip. In Yellowstone National Park, a grizzly attacked a couple out hiking. After the husband cried to his wife to run away, the bear mauled him to death.

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While theories about the immediate causes of these attacks vary — provocative pets; mothers defending cubs; people feeding bears — each incident unnerves. The question is: What’s behind it all?

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One part of the explanation is actually good news, proof that a 36-year federal effort to revitalize the grizzly bear population has worked. “There are certainly more bears on the landscape,” says Chuck Schwartz, head of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, a government-funded research group. In 1975 the federal government declared grizzly bears “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, for the first time protecting critical sections of their habitat and making it illegal to kill them. In the decades since, the number of grizzlies in Yellowstone has tripled, to 600, while in the ecosystem of Glacier National Park, in northwest Montana, the population has more than quadrupled. That area is now home to 900 grizzly bears, up from 200, and the population is growing some 3 percent annually. According to Schwartz, grizzlies are not only more numerous, but they’ve also reoccupied areas from which they were once extirpated.

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Concurrently, more humans than ever have begun to venture into bear country. In 1930, 227,901 people visited Yellowstone. Last year a record 3.6 million did. So Schwartz and other wildlife officials now point to simple probability: More bears and more people mean more people encountering more bears. Logic holds that at least a few of those run-ins aren’t going to be pretty.

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But should it? Today there may be a higher probability of being attacked by a grizzly bear, but are there actually more grizzly attacks? On average, in the continental United States, only five grizzly attacks occur each year. Al Nash, a spokesman for Yellowstone, points out that this summer’s fatal grizzly attack was the first inside the park since 1986. And the rate of injuries from grizzly encounters there is less than one per 2 million visitors; in 1930 it was 350 times that.

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What’s caused the drop? In the early days of the national parks, wide-eyed visitors treated bears as entertainment. They fed them from their cars and ogled them grubbing in garbage. They followed them along trails and stepped closer for a better photo. In turn, those animals learned to be unafraid of humans and to think of them as reliable sources of food. That unnatural dynamic — the feeble attempt at an amicable, rather than a mutually wary, relationship — inevitably led to more attacks. Over the years, however, park officials have worked steadily to convince people to stay away from bears, and those educational efforts have paid off: Despite more bears in the parks and record numbers of visitors, the chances of tragedy have been greatly reduced — regardless of what the headlines report.

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Still, the recent attacks on Hollingsworth and Adolph — two of the most sensational — occurred far outside a national park, and, more important, involved black bears, not grizzlies. The odds of being attacked by a black bear appear low — the animal is far less aggressive than its grizzly cousin. But here, Schwartz’s probabilities kick in. Unlike grizzlies, black bears are highly adaptable, a trait that over time has kept their numbers high. According to Bruce McLellan, a bear biologist in British Columbia, black bears range from the Arctic to subtropical Mexico and subsist on a wide variety of food, including hundreds of plant species and even some animal flesh. Several U.S. states now have black bear populations in the tens of thousands. Since the early 1980s, the number of black bears in California has tripled, to 30,000.

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The sudden ubiquity of black bears has led to a steady increase in attacks. A team of researchers at the University of Calgary recently documented 59 black bear attacks that killed 63 people in Canada and the United States between 1900 and 2009. Of those, 86 percent occurred after 1960. One reason for this is evident: For decades, newly developed resi-dential communities across North America have replaced wooded wildlife habitats with houses, bike paths, and Little League fields. “It’s not so much that bears are coming farther into towns,” says Erik Wenum, a biologist with Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. “It’s that towns are moving farther into prime bear habitat.” And when an animal population rapidly expands at the same time that its habitat drastically shrinks, something’s going to give.

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Even if black bears rarely attack in defense of their cubs, they do get hungry. More frequently, they are finding their meals in the bird feeders, dog-food bowls, fruit trees, and garbage cans that humans have suddenly placed in their environment. When residents come out to shoo the bears away — or simply to take their dog for a walk — things can get dicey. Hollingsworth wasn’t attacked deep in the woods, or even on the edge of them; a black bear sprung upon her in the manicured Pinetop Country Club.

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Two Wyoming-based biologists recently posited that black bears are also more visible in the suburbs because a resurgent grizzly population is elbowing them out of their customary habitat. That theory highlights the interconnectivity of our wildlife management policies and a fundamental dilemma: How do we manage bears so that their numbers will continue to rise but the threat to our lives won’t? Communities like Vail, Colorado, have tried to answer that question by fining its residents $100 if the garbage they drag to the curb isn’t in a bear-proof can. It’s a start, but nowhere near a full solution. And until we find one, the potential for unpredictable bear encounters will be an ever more relevant fact of life.

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This article originally appeared in the October 2011 issue of Men’s Journal.

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