EASTHAMPTON – In the backyard of a home on Briggs Street, a black bear reached up for a bird feeder more than six feet off the ground.
Homeowner Patrick Brough peeked through his window, taking photos. He said the bear soon lost interest when it couldn’t reach the feeder.
In the 20 years Brough has lived in Easthampton, he said he sees a bear about once a year.
“We always take down the feeders or at least stop filling them this time of year,” Brough said.
That is a very good idea, say police and wildlife officials. After bears have passed the winter months away from food sources, they often lumber into backyards in pursuit of tasty smells.
During the springtime, there is an increase in bear sightings reported to the Easthampton Police Department, Officer Chad Alexander said.
When a resident reports a bear nearby, Alexander said an officer will blow an air horn a couple times, which spooks the bear to run off into the woods. In rare instances, local police call in the state Environmental Police to help move a bear safely away from humans.
“They’re more scared of us than we are of them,” he said.
A few of the bears are given GPS collars by the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. For the last 15 years, the GPS collars have been providing a good picture of where bears live and roam, says district manager Ralph Taylor.
Taylor said a bear’s perspective on their surroundings must be like a “kaleidoscope of scents.”
“They have the best olfactory system in the animal kingdom,” Taylor said. “They can smell for miles and miles.”
So when a bear smells something interesting, it explores.
Bears in downtown areas tend to rummage through dumpsters behind restaurants, compost piles and bird feeders – much different than their natural foods of skunk cabbage and larvae.
The GPS tracking collars have led wildlife officials to find bears in such places such as a culvert under King Street in Northampton and underneath the porches of private homes, said Taylor.
MassWildlife (the division’s shorthand name) is now studying bears in urban areas compared to bears in rural areas. While the study is still in early stages, Taylor said it’s clear that bears have learned where to find food in urban areas and remember which house always has a full birdfeeder.
They teach their cubs, Taylor said.
“We call them bear feeders, not birdfeeders,” Taylor said.
When Taylor started at Mass Wildlife in the 1980s, he said the average weight of a female bear was 125 pounds. Recently, they’ve discovered a female that weighed 400 pounds.
And he said the bear population is “skyrocketing.” In the 1980s, Taylor said there were about 500 bears in Massachusetts; now, there are about 5,000.
With humans providing food, competition among bears for food isn’t as fierce, Taylor said. In areas close to urban development, Taylor said female bears are now more willing to allow overlapping in their home range – which is where an animal lives and moves around for food.
Taylor said Mass Wildlife doesn’t have solid statistics on the number of bear sightings, because many people do not call in to report a bear. Due to bears geometrically increasing in the state, more urban communities such as Springfield, where bear sightings are unusual, are calling in more often with complaints and reports.
Mass Wildlife recommends that residents remove bird feeders and secure trash so bears can’t get into it. If a black bear in a backyard, Mass Wildlife said residents should make noise by banging pots and pans, shouting or using an air horn. Bears in a forest will naturally go away when they hear the sound of a person.
And when it comes to getting attacked by a black bear, Taylor said “I tell people they have a better chance of being hit by an asteroid.”
Caitlin Ashworth can be reached at cashworth@gazettenet.com.