Parched summer in the Rockies sends hungry bears into urban areas and confrontations with people

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Patrick Sullivan was sure it was a “crazy neighbor” honking a car horn nonstop while Sullivan was up feeding his infant son at 3 a.m. one night this summer.

It was a neighbor all right, but not a human one. A black bear had opened the door of a Toyota SUV and gotten trapped inside the vehicle in Gold Hill, Colorado, northwest of Denver.

In one of hundreds of examples of bears getting into more trouble than usual in the parched Rocky Mountains this summer, the animal kept bumping the horn as it ripped apart the Toyota's interior, desperately trying to escape.

“It’s totaled. It’s unfit to drive," Sullivan said of the car.

Millions of people live in or near bear habitat across the Rockies, where widespread drought has reduced supplies of nuts, berries and plants that bears eat. That’s prompting the animals to roam far and wide for food.

Sullivan's brother-in-law eventually freed the bear trapped in the Toyota. But such encounters can be deadly for bears. One recently stuck in a car in Colorado Springs died from the heat, and wildlife officials have killed dozens of others that could endanger people.

Colorado officials report twice as many bear sightings and conflicts with humans this year compared with the average, including bears roaming where they aren't normally found. Wildlife managers in New Mexico and Utah report record numbers of hungry bears have lost their natural hesitancy to raid homes, cars and campgrounds.

A black bear up a tree in central Denver recently was tranquilized and relocated. At Colorado State University in Fort Collins, a bear during the fall semester move-in had to be caught and released elsewhere. In Utah, authorities moved four bears from the town of Moab where they’d been feasting in orchards.

“Bears aren’t necessarily behaving any differently but they are definitely increasing their activity in the places that they’re looking for food," said Travis Sauder, a state wildlife officer in southeastern Colorado.

Black bears usually stick to Colorado's mountains and foothills. This year they've been spotted on the plains more than an hour's drive east of Colorado Springs.

“When they get that far east, there’s just zero natural food sources that they would be looking for, like oaks or chokecherries,” Sauder said.

There are plenty of temptations for hungry bears around homes: pet food in open garages, bird feeders and grease traps under barbecue grills. And then there's trash in unsecured bins, by far the biggest attractant behind this year's surge in bear activity, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife data.

Many bears that visit populated areas are tranquilized and moved out of town. If they start associating food with people, however, they can be euthanized.

“A fed bear is a dead bear,” is the mantra of wildlife officials. They urge people to stash away anything a bear might even think of eating.

Black bears typically avoid people and are less dangerous than the larger grizzly bears of the Northern Rockies.

But black bears can be aggressive toward humans: In June, a black bear followed and then attacked and scratched a hiker in Golden, Colorado.

Colorado has had at least four more attacks, including a bear outside an apartment building near Vail that scratched a man on Aug. 17 as he left a laundry room.

Five days later, a bear tackled and bit a fisherman in the mountains southwest of Denver. The young bear was tracked down and killed.

In Utah, over three dozen bears have been killed this year. That's more than the past three years combined, according to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.

The number killed by wildlife officials and authorized property owners in New Mexico is already up to 187, the most since 2011.

Across the Upper Colorado River Basin spanning Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, this year’s snowpack was the worst on record. Scientists say human-caused global warming made that far more likely.

“Human-animal conflicts in the context of climate change haven’t really been fully researched yet. And we’re still starting to kind of tease out what this means for us and what this means for all the species that we share the ecosystem with,” said Samantha Miller, senior carnivore campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Add in vast areas of bear habitat scorched by record wildfires and it's a recipe for problems.

A few bear-trouble stories are heartwarming, like orphaned cubs successfully released into the wild after time in a rescue facility, where they learned to live on their own without raiding.

“We’ve got to rescue a lot of bear cubs out of trees, including standing on some pretty shaky ladders to pull a bear cub that’s sleeping in a tree,” said Sauder.

Andy Kerrigan, while working on a deck in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, this summer, found a cub that got into his truck through a window. He banged on the truck to scare it off.

“But it had found my lunch in the seat. And it was like, ‘I’m not going anywhere,’” said Kerrigan, who eventually chased it away with a piece of wood trim.

In Gold Hill, Sullivan's brother-in-law solved the bear-in-Toyota problem by tugging a rope tied to a door handle. The bear bolted for the woods through the open door.

“It was just sitting there waiting for someone to help him, basically,” Sullivan said. “So I’m glad we could have done that for him.”