This story by Aaron Calvin was first published in the Stowe Reporter on July 25.
A black bear that broke into a home on White Gates Lane earlier this month had to be chased away with a warning shot.
Rod Egger’s son and a friend had left the sliding glass door of the home open when they left to go swimming, according to a police report. They returned to find the screen door opened, cabinets torn apart, and trash strewn about the kitchen.
The culprit was still on the back deck when they returned home. They yelled and waved their arms in the air, and instead of fleeing from them as expected, the bear began to walk toward them. It took a 12-gauge shotgun round fired over the head of the bear by Egger to ultimately scare it off.
Egger told police that the bear was not afraid and continued to come around the house.
In the rural neighborhood off Weeks Hill Road just the next day, Egger’s neighbor on White Gates Lane, Suzanne Szermer, reported a bear had broken into her home.
After returning from a bike ride to find trash strewn about the house, Szermer called for help. Like Egger’s son, she had left the sliding glass door open with a screen door closed. The bear demolished a planter on one side of the house to squeeze through the window before it removed the screen door entirely and dumped a gallon of cooking oil over her oven.
The bear was spotted on Szermer’s porch again the next day but fled before police arrived.
Last Wednesday, a bear climbed into the attic section of a Stowe home where an empty bird feeder was hanging and had to be coaxed out and away from the property by Stowe police and Vermont Fish & Wildlife, who posted a video to the Vermont Warden Service Instagram page with a reminder to secure garbage, take down bird feeders and practice bear-safe composting.
The black bear population is currently at the five-year peak of a long-term stable population, according to state wildlife biologist and black bear expert Jaclyn Comeau, with somewhere between 7,000 to 8,500 black bears roaming Vermont.
With its spread-out rural neighborhoods and multi-million-dollar homes fracturing large segments of wilderness, Comeau said Stowe “consistently has the highest reports of bears trying to access human caused foods.”
Reports of bears ripping apart dumpsters and becoming unfortunate traffic fatalities, as one did two years ago, is nothing new, but this wave of break-ins is reflective of their growing boldness in search of the rewards found in human areas.
“In rarer cases, but it’s seemingly an increasing number of cases, we are getting more reports of pretty egregious levels of property damage and really persistent behaviors from bears that are just not giving up on trying to find these human food sources,” Comeau said.
In the wild, bears get defensive over food sources with other bears. With some bears growing comfortable enough with humans to treat them like any other biped, they’re increasingly willing to get defensive over a dumpster or other food source.
While the town has invested in bear-proof dumpsters for some of its parks and public areas, plenty of homes, restaurants and other businesses may not be using bear-safe dumpsters.
The best strategy of bear deterrent, according to Comeau, is to reduce the accessibility of food and waste as much as possible — securing garbage, removing bird feeders — while also making a bear’s time in town as uncomfortable as possible.
Making as much noise as possible, setting up an electric fence and evening arming yourself with a paintball gun, which Comeau said was a good way to make a bear nonlethally uncomfortable, are all ways to make sure a bear doesn’t want to come back around.
Police advised Egger to request rubber bullets from a game warden in case of future bear incidents, but Comeau advised this should only be done on a case-by-case basis, with rubber bullets still having the potential to injure a bear or others if improperly used.
In general, Comeau advised that Stowe is bear country, and its people are just living in it.
“It is critical that everyone in town — on the edge of town, even in a condo downtown — needs to understand that they are living in bear country, and it is very likely that a bear will pass through your property,” she said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Brazen bears rattle Stowe.