Feral Cities by Tristan Donovan

Author:Tristan Donovan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Although city life hasn’t done much to change mountain lions, it has had a profound effect on another potential man-eater. For the past thirty years American black bears have moved into urban North America in a big way. From New Jersey to New Mexico, sightings and complaints about urban bears have soared as new developments encroach on their habitat and the appeal of garbage draws them to the bright lights.

Smart and adaptable, black bears have been making the most of what cities can offer hungry bears. In Colorado Springs one enterprising bear wheeled away a five-hundred-pound Dumpster from the back of Edelweiss Restaurant, just south of downtown. After dragging the German restaurant’s Dumpster to a parking lot, the bear gorged on leftover Wiener schnitzel and grilled bratwurst. The bear must have liked its takeaway because the following night it returned to steal another of the restaurant’s Dumpsters.

In Anchorage bears have learned how to deal with the electric fences people use to keep them out of their property, avoiding those with three or more electrified strands while stepping through the gap in those with just two wires.

Few places have had an influx of black bears as startling as that seen in the towns and cities near Lake Tahoe. Between 1997 and 2006 the area’s bears switched en masse from a rural life to an urban one. Complaints about them in places like Carson City and South Lake Tahoe rose ten-fold and the number of bears involved in traffic accidents increased seventeen-fold. So many bears have moved in that the Lake Tahoe Basin now boasts one of the highest densities of urban black bears in North America and biologists are finding it a real challenge to find bears outside the city limits.

But the bears didn’t just relocate. They changed.

For a start, they got fatter. Spoiled by the abundance of human food to eat, the urban bears ended up almost a third heavier than those in the wild. In fact the amount of food on offer in the towns and cities was so great that bears would even stop feeding when there was more food available, despite their need to eat fifteen thousand or more calories every day.

They became less active too. Their home ranges shriveled by as much as 90 percent and even in the buildup to hibernation they remained less active than rural bears. They also became night owls, rarely venturing out until the sun began to set, presumably to reduce their chances of bumping into people. In contrast rural bears are active during the daytime too.

There were odder, less easily explained changes as well. In the urban areas there were more than four times as many male bears than in the wild. Then, there were the females. In the wild the average female bear gets pregnant at seven or eight years old, but in the city they were getting pregnant at four or five. Some were getting pregnant as young as two years old, mere months after separating from their mother.

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