Julia Corrigan was carrying her 2-year-old daughter from the car to their home in suburban Bloomfield when she noticed that the screen door had been torn off its hinges and the inner door was wide open. Her first clue to the likely suspect was kitchen garbage strewn all over the floor.
A half-dozen police cars soon arrived, and the officers, guns drawn, determined that the perpetrator was long gone. But they knew it could return, so they deployed a large cage, baited it with doughnuts, and waited. And waited. The plan, Corrigan says, was to catch the culprit, sedate it and then leave it on her front lawn; when it awoke it would be euthanized. Luckily for all involved, it never returned for the doughnuts.
There were 67 such black bear home break-ins last year in Connecticut, up from a handful only seven years ago, and 10 times more than in Massachusetts, which has about four times as many bears. There were many attempted break-ins as well. Connecticut also logs more reported human-bear conflicts, 2,000-plus annually, than the Bay State, and more than its other New England neighbors as well. Some encounters have turned dangerous, as when a bear mauled a 10-year-boy in Morris in October 2022, one of two attacks in Connecticut last year, and when another bit a 74-year-old woman in Avon in April. Roughly 40 bears a year are killed on Nutmeg State roadways, again more than in Massachusetts.
A mother bear and her cubs after being rescued from a sewer drain in Simsbury in August 2022.
Courtesy Libby Lord Photography/Journal InquirerCorrigan’s experience is a sign of the times. If you haven’t seen a bear yet, you likely know people in Connecticut who have. Where are you likely to see a bear nowadays? Short answer: just about anywhere you look: at popular tourist destinations like Gillette Castle State Park in East Haddam (a hiker friend of mine saw one there); at a liquor store in Bristol (it lumbered through the automatic door); denning up under the crawl space of your deck (one sleepy fellow nicknamed Marty found a comfy spot in Plainville); hopping on a backyard trampoline in Farmington; joining in a parade and busting into a bakery to munch on cupcakes in Avon; chowing down at your bird feeder; anywhere there is food lying about.
American black bears (Ursus americanus) have been reported in 158 of the state’s 169 towns, and in more than 90 of those burgs, sows are raising cubs — generally two per litter survive. And they are just getting started.
RELATED: Joining a DEEP survey, I had an up-close and personal encounter with a mama bear and her cub.
“There is just as much if not more bear habitat in eastern Connecticut that is not occupied as yet, and will eventually fill in,” says Jason Hawley, wildlife biologist and bear expert with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. He estimates the current population at between 1,000 to 1,200 individuals. “My guess is we’re getting fairly close to a carrying capacity in western Connecticut, with the exception of southwestern and south-central Connecticut. I expect the population will at least double when the whole state is occupied.”
Home entries by bears in Connecticut have increased dramatically over the last several years. There were a record 67 reported incidents of bears entering houses in 2022, along with dozens of attempted entries.
Connecticut Magazine/Source: Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental ProtectionHow to cope with all these ravenous bears was a huge topic in the recent legislative session in Hartford, even getting more attention than proposals to address climate change. Controversy erupted over whether to institute a bear-hunting season — something DEEP has been pushing for more than a decade — in a bill that included other measures aimed at mitigating human-bear conflicts. Eventually a bill was passed which allows people to kill a bear if they believe it is an imminent danger or if a bear has entered a home. But, after fervent opposition, no bear hunt was introduced.
Also under the new law, DEEP can issue nuisance wildlife permits to kill bears and other wildlife that threaten or cause damage to agricultural crops, livestock and apiaries. Before a permit is granted, the landowner must prove they have made nonlethal attempts, such as electric fencing, to stop the bears. The bill also prohibits people from intentionally feeding bears. Fines under the new law would range from $35 to $90 plus additional surcharges. Not included in the final bill were restrictions on unintentionally feeding bears, such as leaving trash accessible and hanging bird feeders.
Marty the bear hibernated under the deck of the Dashukewich’s family home in Plainville.
Vincent Dashukewich/contributedProponents of a hunt point out that Connecticut and Rhode Island (which has no bears to speak of yet) are the only states in the Northeast without a bear hunt. Before the bill passed, Connecticut was one of only four states, along with Maine, Massachusetts and Vermont, to allow people to feed bears. Hawley says that some residents hand-feed the large animals. (In a particularly bizarre case earlier this year, a Hartland man who state officials say was feeding bears on his 100-plus-acre property and charging people to see them up close accused DEEP of fitting a bear with a camera to capture evidence of the feeding.) Black bears, omnivores that will eat just about anything with nutritional value, can tip the scales at 500 pounds or more.
RELATED: Bear encounters are on the rise—what do to if you see a bear.
Not only does Connecticut have an exploding bear population, but its fecund bruins seem to be rowdier than your average bear. Dave Wattles, black bear and furbearer biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, has a theory. “I know there’s a massive issue with intentional feeding in Connecticut,” he says. “We don’t have things such as the home entries like your state does. In the past few years, we’ve had a handful. And they tend to happen just north of our border with Connecticut.”
The Massachusetts hunt, which kills about 250 bears annually, likely harvests some “problem” bears, Wattles says. “Is it possible to target a bear that is causing damage during the hunting season? Not necessarily, but some of those bolder animals are going to be removed during the hunting season because they have become less wary of humans.”
Black bear in Simsbury resident Tonya Lok’s backyard.
Tonya LokHawley points to geography to help explain why Connecticut bears get into more scrapes with people than those in other states: “A lot of factors are at play; certainly the structure of the landscape plays a big role, the way we have this exurban landscape in Connecticut where you have really good bear habitat intermingled among suburbia. Certainly, Massachusetts has a similar landscape, but I think we do have more highly habituated bears here. The fact that Massachusetts has a hunting season plays a part. I think just having a harvest brings a healthy fear of humans back into the equation. Rather than teaching their cubs to seek out human food sources, mother bears will teach them to stay away from people.”
New York has had a bear hunt since 1903 and the population there continues to rise, according to Brendan Quirion, big game biologist with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. He notes, however, that with more than six times as many bears as Connecticut, his state has about the same number of annually reported human-bear conflicts.
Quirion says that New York’s bear hunt stands on its own merits as a traditional recreational experience for sportspeople, and that issues such as lack of access of hunters to urban and suburban environments can limit a hunt’s effectiveness in impacting population growth and problem bears.
Bear cubs in a tree in a Farmington yard.
Catherine SkaperdaJoe Northrup, a research scientist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, has done studies on the impact of hunting on bear populations. “In Connecticut it will depend on the area you have open for hunting,” he says. “I know there is quite a bit of private land there, and if you don’t have a lot of access for hunters, and the hunt is concentrated in small areas, and you don’t have a lot of people hunting, there’s not going to be much hope of keeping the population down and thereby controlling conflict.”
In one of his studies, predicated on the addition in 2014 of a spring bear hunt to the traditional fall season in parts of Ontario, Northup found that human-bear conflicts actually increased as a result. (While he’s unsure of the reason for the increase, Northup says one possibility is that there was less natural food for them that spring so they went after garbage.)
New York’s Quirion agrees that a hunting season isn’t a silver bullet for addressing issues that a growing bear population presents. “Recreational hunting isn’t the primary tool we use to address conflicts,” he says.
Black bears are present in all states in the Northeast region, with the exceptions of Rhode Island and Delaware. Of these, Connecticut’s bears have by far the highest proportion of conflicts with humans relative to the size of their actual population, with nearly 8 conflicts for every 10 bears. Bear conflicts include home entries, livestock attacks, apiary and other agricultural damage, damage to vehicles and structures, and physical altercations with pets and people. Source: 2019 Survey of Eastern State and Provincial Black Bear Biologists, 24th Eastern Black Bear Workshop, via Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection
Connecticut MagazineSo what’s the answer? Is Connecticut, which has seen three bear attacks since 2022, destined to become the new New Jersey, which reported 62 aggressive encounters between bears and people in 2022? A Rutgers student was killed there by a black bear in 2014, a horrific and, thankfully, exceedingly rare occurrence.
While the tactics may vary, the overall solution is decidedly simple. It’s been clear for 40 years, when bears from New York and the Berkshires began returning to their ancestral habitat in western Massachusetts and eventually Connecticut. They are still heading eastward in both states. Towns like Simsbury have been dealing with these shaggy immigrants for three decades.
Simsbury First Selectwoman Wendy Mackstutis sees them in her yard, as has her dog, and she can live with that. “It’s a little nerve-wracking, but I am not a fan of the hunting. I know you can’t hunt the bears in our yards, right? You can’t shoot a bear in your yard … I just can’t imagine seeing a bear carcass, I don’t want to see that. I don’t have a solution, obviously. We put in place an ordinance a couple of years ago prohibiting wildlife feeding for anyone who is doing that intentionally.”
RELATED: Some CT state officials say it’s time for a bear hunt.
As the weather gets colder, DEEP warns CT residents to be on the lookout for bears.
In fact, Simsbury is on the right track, and Connecticut followed its lead this year by making feeding bears illegal statewide. After the passage of the bear bill, DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said in a press release: “Humans feeding bears is the primary cause of bear habituation, which in turn can lead to home entries and dangerous human-bear interactions. Banning the intentional feeding of potentially dangerous wildlife will help residents understand their responsibility to protect people, pets, and bears by preventing bears from threatening neighborhoods in their search for food.”
Massachusetts’ Wattles agrees with the commissioner. “In reality, 99.9 percent of it is trying to get the public to not provide food to bears, to remove their bird feeders in the warmer months. If people would secure their garbage, you would be amazed how these problems would disappear.”
Animal rights advocates also say there are effective ways to reduce human-bear encounters, and a hunt is not one of them. “We would like to see a lot more people educated about bears,” says Ann Gadwah, advocacy and outreach organizer for the Sierra Club’s Connecticut Chapter. “The state has gotten a little bit better lately about getting good information to people about how to coexist peacefully with bears: make sure you secure your trash, bring in your bird feeders, make sure you don’t have anything that will attract bears into your yard, and — if you see a bear in your yard — you should scare it, making it not welcome there.”
This bear family loves to hang out in Farmington resident Olivia Germano’s backyard.
Olivia GermanoThe solution centers on food, according to Laura Simon, president of the Connecticut Rehabilitators Wildlife Association. “The success that other states have had is through prioritizing public education and removal of attractants, because bears come for the free buffet,” says Simon, a wildlife ecologist. “The way to manage bears is through their tummy. Hunting does not work; it’s the wrong approach. You end up taking out bears in wild areas that are not causing problems. But the DEEP is still pushing the hunt as a solution.”
A mother bear and cubs love to play on the trampoline in Farmington resident Olivia Germano’s backyard.
Olivia GermanoShe adds that a hunt, as well as the 2023 bill that allows residents to shoot bears deemed to be menacing them, their pets or their farm animals, will result in more orphaned cubs. The rehabilitation of black bears is not permitted in Connecticut.
Other tasty incentives for bears to nose around people’s properties are pet food left outside for cats and dogs, greasy barbecue grills, unsecured chicken coops and beehives. Nearly 75 percent of all human-bear conflicts involve unsecured garbage and bird feeders, according to DEEP. Chickens represent 85 percent of agricultural losses. Without an electric fence to protect them, the flock doesn’t stand a chance.
In something of a test demonstration of this food-deprivation approach, Salisbury, in Connecticut’s extreme northwest corner, deployed bear-proof garbage bins in its two villages, Lakeville and Salisbury, where bears were almost as common as second homeowners. The town invested in heavy-duty receptacles for each town center. “We put them in two years ago, eight of them, four each for Lakeville and Salisbury,” First Selectman Curtis Rand says. “It had an immediate impact on the bear traffic. I have never seen a bear in the villages since then.”
Rand also says that people in towns like his have grown accustomed to living with bears over the decades. “They can sometimes be a nuisance, but people have gotten pretty well adjusted to them. They take down their bird feeders; I haven’t had complaints about that. We’re getting along.”
DEEP’s Hawley agrees that denying bears easy access to our trash is the wave of the future. “I think bear-proof garbage cans will eventually be a no-brainer in Connecticut. We see more and more people getting them, and most of the big garbage collectors offer them. I know towns are talking about requiring them. I’d like to see them be the norm here.”
Bear-proof bins aren’t cheap — costing $200 to $300 or more — so any widespread use for haulers’ entire routes likely would depend on some sort of subsidy.
Receptacles aside, how often Connecticut residents see black bears in their yards or on Main Street may have as much to do with Mother Nature as with anything our species does, according to New York’s Quinion. “The conflicts are primarily the result of food availability, both naturally, depending on weather conditions, and in terms of what people provide in terms of attractants. If you have a particularly dry year like last year, there is not much for bears to eat in the natural environment, so they seek out human food sources, and that can increase the likelihood of conflicts.”
Social media lights up when bears make the news, and some have speculated that the conflicts are the result of humans encroaching on traditional bear habitat, something that can affect some species. But not bears, according to DEEP. The bears are entering towns and cities on their own, wandering out of the woods to see what’s on the menu. And they are finding a rich harvest in Connecticut. A 2017 study led by UConn professor Dr. Tracy Rittenhouse concluded, “Human habitation is not displacing but attracting species like bears and bobcats. This is the first study to put solid evidence and numbers behind the idea that there are more bears in exurban places rather than rural places. We have in Connecticut this mixture of natural habitat and urbanization where both bears and people live in the same places.”
Biologists point out that a fed bear is in danger of becoming a dead bear, and any bears that scavenge food in human settings tend not to be as healthy as those that stick to their natural diet in the woods.
The bear has been in the tree for at least the last six weeks, neighbors said.
Contributed photo / Martha GuidryThe on-again-off-again Connecticut bear hunt will be off the table until 2025, according to state Rep. Joseph Gresko (D-Stratford), chair of the General Assembly’s Environmental Committee. The hunt was nixed in committee and didn’t make it to a floor vote. “We passed the rest of the bill, but the votes were not there for the hunting season,” he says. “I don’t see it coming up in February, in the legislative session next year, only because it is going to be the same members on the committee as this year. So in 2025 we will revisit this if we need to.”
Meanwhile, DEEP has various programs and outreach efforts in place to educate the public on how to coexist with black bears. These include presentations at schools and civic groups, a video series, webinars, social media updates during the bears’ active season from late March to November, and a well-illustrated “State of the Bears” PDF that summarizes recent data and compares Connecticut’s ursine situation to that of surrounding states. DEEP also recommends the “Living with Black Bears” section of its website (portal.ct.gov/DEEP/Wildlife/Living-with-Black-Bears) and a second website, BearWise (bearwise.org).
Ongoing research includes tagging and putting radio collars on sows so that biologists can track them to their dens in the spring, count the cubs, and determine the health of the family. They sometimes invite the media along.
Hawley does about 30 such scientific forays a year and has conducted hundreds over the past 18 years. It often involves getting right in mama’s face, injecting her with a tranquilizer — often with a handheld spear — and waiting for the drug to take effect so they can perform their health assessment. He says in all that time he’s never been touched, nary a scratch. “Bears don’t want to interact with people unless there’s a significant reward,” he says. “I’ve had them push past me, or where I had to duck down, and they’d run right over the top of me to get away.”
David Holahan is an award-winning journalist from East Haddam whose work has appeared in Connecticut Magazine since the mid-’80s. Other credits include The New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the East Haddam News.
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