ASHEVILLE – When Barber Melton saw black bear cubs pulling undergarments off the clothesline in her Haw Creek backyard, she didn’t try to shoo them away.

“The cubs were playing with my bra like a slingshot. We watched that for a good 40 minutes. They also pulled off a couple of T-shirts. When I went to get them, there wasn’t a single hole in any of them,” said Melton.

She was born and raised in the East Asheville neighborhood that butts up against the Blue Ridge Parkway and is a known hotbed for bear activity. “Bears are fun to watch.”

As a founding member of the Haw Creek Neighborhood Association more than 33 years ago, Melton said while she and her family enjoy the bears, there is a certain protocol for living in bear country and is encouraging her neighbors to partner with the North Carolina Urban/Suburban Bear Study in its second phase.

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The cooperative research study between North Carolina State University and the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, the first such study in the Southeast, began in April 2014.

The goal was to look at the spatial ecology of black bears in Asheville by capturing bears within a 1-mile radius of the city, placing radio collars on them, which naturally fall off after a certain amount of time, then releasing them, while continuing to track the bears to gather data in order to inform future bear management decisions.

Now as that data is being analyzed, with findings to be released this fall, people will see the giant soup can-like bear traps showing up around town again. The second phase began last month with the objective to work with residents to become certified “BearWise” neighborhoods, said Jennifer Strules, an N.C. State doctoral student.

She said two of the target neighborhoods are Haw Creek and Town Mountain, which have the highest amount of bear activity in Asheville.

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At a recent meeting in Haw Creek, Melton said residents showed enthusiasm for learning how to coexist safely and intelligently with black bears.

“It’s going to be a slow process,” Melton said. The study leaders are looking for 1,000 people in each of the neighborhoods to agree to adhere to the six BearWise principles.

“It takes education to get folks to understand to just use your common sense. You don’t put your garbage out two days before pickup,” Melton said.

“There is a way to live with the bears without getting angry. They need to exist with us. We’re the ones who have forced them into this situation. They’ve been pushed out of their habitat. So we just have to buck up and live with them,” she said.

What did Phase I find?

Dr. Chris DePerno, professor in fisheries, wildlife and conservation biology program at N.C. State who oversees the work of Strules and doctoral candidate Nick Gould and is the study's co-lead with Wildlife Commission bear biologist Colleen Olfenbuttel, said the first part of the study was “a huge success.”

“The private landowners of Asheville have been wonderful. We could not have done the project without them. We have two fabulous students that work extremely hard. The technology and all the hard work has generated a tremendous amount of data that’s really going to benefit bear management in NC and the region and beyond.”

Between April 2014 and August 2018, researchers captured about 165 unique bears, and another 80 bears were recaptured over the four years, for a total of 245 bears captured on the project, Gould said. They were captured only on private property, with the approval of landowners, as close to city limits as possible.

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What the four years’ worth of data shows from measuring and weighing them and tracking their movements and den sites will take a while to sort through, Gould said, stressing that any results are only preliminary.

But he did have some tasty morsels of information to share.

“The most surprising finding from the study would have to be how cooperative and willing the citizens of Asheville were to be a part of the study,” he said. On some properties, more than a dozen different bears were captured over the course of the four years.

“Another surprising result was that reproduction was fairly consistent. We documented a 2-year-old bear successfully having cubs in each year of the study,” Gould said.

A GPS location map shows that bears have made themselves quite comfortable across the city, with nearly 1 million sites over the four years. They don’t “need” to leave the city limits to den, Gould said, but can hunker down for the winter and have their cubs very close to people and activity. In some cases, bears were found denning near downtown and on a highway median.

Other preliminary findings:

83 dens were located and associated with collared bears – 68 females and 15 males.

Back bears typically begin reproducing at age 3 or 4.

Documented litters: 12 litters of one cub, 13 litters of two cubs, 12 litters of three cubs, six litters of four cubs, and one litter with five cubs, whose mother was 15 years old.

Locations of the dens were distributed across the city, mostly northeast and southwest of Asheville.

Most dens – 67, or 81% - were ground dens located in dense cover, 13 were in tree dens and three dens were underneath front porches.

Black bears in Asheville typically den between the third week in December and the third week in March - important information for Asheville residents, Gould said.

On average, female dens were about 130 meters from a residence, while male bear dens were an average of 490 meters from a residence.

The largest bear captured was a 572-pound, 11-year-old male, on April 25, 2014 in East Asheville, who was not collared.

On April 14, 2015, researchers captured a 526-pound, 8-year old male bear in southwest Asheville, who was collared.

Some yearlings were quite large. The study had a few 1- to 1 ½-year-olds that were captured that weighed from 186 up to 239 pounds. The average yearling on previous studies in rural areas weighed under 100 pounds.

The largest female yearling bears weighed from 107 to 142 pounds. As comparison, the average “rural” yearling bear weighs in the range of 45-85-pound range.

“All of these preliminary findings suggest that Asheville is productive bear habitat,” Gould said.

Some of the results he said people can expect when the report is completed this year are the causes of mortality – preliminary results show most bears killed in Asheville are by motor vehicles, while legal hunting is the main cause in more rural areas – as well as survival rates of black bears in urban habitats.

Results should also show bear movements, such as annual and seasonal home ranges and features of travel corridors, reproductive parameters, habitat characteristics of dens, and timing of den entry and exit of black bears in urban habitats.

Have you encountered a bear?

Justin McVey, mountain region wildlife biologist for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, spends the better part of his spring chasing bear calls. He said North Carolina has a healthy black bear populations, with roughly 7,000-9,000 in the WNC mountains, and another 11,000-13,000 on the coast, for a total of some 18,000-21,000.

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He said people should only call the wildlife commission if a bear is injured or orphaned or is causing harm.

“Even though it seems odd, bears are a part of our urban and suburban landscape, so it’s not uncommon to see bears,” McVey said. “But if a bear is repeatedly breaking into something, acting strangely, looks sickly, that would be the time to call. We don’t want bears under porches, but that doesn’t happen all the time.”

He said following the six BearWise principles will go a long way toward human-bear harmony:

Never feed or approach bears.

Secure food, garbage and recycling.

Remove bird feeders when bears are active.

Never leave pet food outdoors.

Clean and store grills.

Alert neighbors to bear activity.

“Asheville is a good place to be a bear. You have a lot of natural landscape, but also lots of human sources of food, so it’s like a buffet,” McVey said.

Black bears starting coming out of the dens in late March, searching for food after a long winter’s nap. This is the time, he said, to pull in bird feeders and be vigilant about keeping garbage secured.

Strules said the research study will now focus on human-black bear interactions through the BearWise Certification program, and will also continue to trap bears in the Haw Creek and Town Mountain neighborhoods to see if the habits of black bears change in response to these communities becoming BearWise certified.

What does it take to become 'BearWise'?

To become BearWise certified is no small feat, Strules said.

Residents and businesses must agree to follow the six BearWise basics on their property. Neighborhoods need to have an organizational structure to determine if there are attractants that bears are using as food sources.

“Then you have to take it to a higher level of organization and figure out if as a community they are ready to take action,” Strules said. “They need to elect a BearWise liaison. Not a vigilante, but maybe someone who disperses a newsletter to remind people not to put garbage out or bird feeders out. They can also be the person to interact with Wildlife Commission for technical resources and advisement.”

Once a community is BearWise certified they will have Wildlife Commission signs to proudly display.

“It means they’re making a commitment to keeping neighborhoods safe and bears wild, and that’s what we all want,” Strules said. “We can do it. It’s been amply demonstrated in other areas throughout Western North America.”

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Olfenbuttel, the wildlife commission’s black bear and furbearer biologist, said neighborhoods should have a system for noncompliance, such as a homeowner’s association ordinance that would require people to remove certain attractants, like bird feeders and dog food, and perhaps to use bear-resistant trash containers.

The study will look at not only how bears respond to having such systems in place, but how the humans respond, Olfenbuttel said.

“Human behavior is the most challenging problem we have. It’s easy to change bear behavior, especially with bird feeders. But we get a lot of resistance from people. They are surprised and upset that a bear would dare get into their bird feeder. We try to explain that the bears don’t know it’s there for the birds,” Olfenbuttel said.

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“People are critically important in helping us keep bears wild,” she said.

One of the most important things that people can do across Asheville to lessen conflict with bears is to not put their garbage out until the morning of pickup, she said.

Last September, a 75-year-old Swannanoa woman suffered serious injuries after she was bitten and scratched by a female black bear near her home while she was walking her dog on a leash about 10:30 p.m.

Olfenbuttel said the woman and her husband were following all the right rules, but a neighbor had put out the garbage the night before, attracting the bear.

“Bears have an excellent memory. They do learn when garbage day is. They know which houses are going to have garbage out the night before,” she said. “Putting out garbage the morning of pickup will reduce many human-bear interactions. For the most part, bears are active in evening hours.”

If people don’t have a garage to securely store garbage, they can also use bear-resistant trash cans, which are made of heavier plastic that can withstand a bear's beating and have a gravity operated latch that will open once cans are completely upside down, so they can be used with standard, automated dump trucks.

The tricky point is the price – Olfenbuttel said they can cost between $200-$225 apiece. She said the Wildlife Commission is working with manufactures to get reduced price and shipping and have a local store carry them.

She said the goal is to have neighborhoods BearWise certified by fall of 2020. It will then take at least a year analyze all the data. The field work will end in March 2022 with removal of all GPS collars, and results should be available in late 2023.

The majority of the funding for the bear study, 75%, comes from the Pittman-Robertson Act, a federal law passed in 1937 that put a federal excise tax on firearms and ammunition to provide aid to states for management and restoration of wildlife. The remaining 25% comes from N.C. State.

At that the end of the study, researchers will be able to tell if the BearWise program had a change in people’s knowledge and perspective and in human-bear interactions.

“The gold standard would be for everybody to have a bear resistant trash can and have HOAs pass an ordinance that would require removal of bird feeders in summer time,” Olfenbuttel said.

“But we realize that each community is unique and some can’t afford bear-resistant trash cans. We will work with each community and be flexible in options.”

Living with bears