Lake Tahoe’s Bear Boom
November 26, 2024 at 01:39AMThe bears of Lake Tahoe are growing in audacity, but who wouldn’t choose dumpster pizza over foraging for berries? Paige Williams explores the conflicts arising in an area with a booming human and bear population. While a local BEAR league attempts to ease the situation, confrontations are increasingly common—and sometimes devastating.
In autumn, bears enter hyperphagia: they must eat at least twenty thousand calories (the equivalent of thirty-six Big Macs) a day before they den. The females are on a deadline to store enough fat to sustain themselves, and a pregnancy, until spring, though in Tahoe, where there’s plenty of touron food year-round, bears hardly have to hibernate anymore. Bears have learned how to unscrew lids. They know how to open sliding glass doors. They’ll prowl from car to car, trying handles. Ryan Welch, the founder of Tahoe’s oldest bear-deterrent company, Bear Busters, told me about a woman who reported her Prius missing; the police found the car at the bottom of the hill that she’d parked it on, with a bear inside. Bears have learned that they can wander onto a crowded beach and help themselves to picnic food, with humans standing feet away, casually videoing, and that they can spook hikers into dropping their snack-filled packs. This spring, a bear snatched a construction worker’s cooler from the bed of a pickup and ate the man’s lunch in front of him. A Tahoe friend of mine once turned her back while unloading groceries and lost a fifteen-pound Christmas roast; the bear left nothing but a greasy scrap of butcher paper in the driveway.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/25/lake-tahoes-bear-boom/
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