Be Bear Aware: 10 Tips for Black Bear Safety on Your Rural Property

Reader Contribution by Victoria Gazeley
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I’d say I’m pretty bear aware.  Black bears were a pretty everyday sight growing up on the West Coast of British Columbia. In fact, as kids, we used to go watch them at the dump as an after dinner adventure (back when we had open garbage dumps). Not too smart, but hey, it was the 70s! I make no claim to being politically or environmentally correct in that decade, as evidenced by the photos of me in 1975 in my orange and brown plaid polyester bell bottoms and orange turtleneck, but I digress…  We also used to wake up to round paw prints on our basement windows.  So yes, bears were a pretty common occurrence.  And we didn’t think much about bear safety or any wildlife safety, for that matter.

But something has changed. I don’t remember ever hearing about black bear maulings growing up. Maybe we were sheltered from the news, but I really don’t think so.

Now, just this past week, there have been 3 black bear attacks on grown adults here in British Columbia, one of them lethal, another almost so.  Highly unusual.  There are always a few “bear attacks” each spring, summer and fall as a result of people feeding bears (on purpose or not) or coming across young males feeding or mama bears and their babes, but they seem particularly numerous this year and there seems to be more incidents of bears stalking people.  So what’s going on?  More people out in the bush, hiking and camping and exploring?  Absolutely?  More people moving to or visiting rural areas that are’s familiar with the ways of bears?  Possibly.

But the question is particularly disconcerting to me now that we just added chickens to our homestead and just this afternoon had what we think was a two or three year old male black bear nosing around the edge of the property. You know, the young kind that are on their own for the first time and haven’t quite learned the ways of the world between humans and bears.  The dog took a run at him and sent him off into the bush, but the dog doesn’t live here, so when Katy isn’t around, we’re on our own.  Two years ago there was a BIG old male living somewhere outside our property periphery – we saw him numerous times, but not recently. And he always ran away when we yelled and clapped at him – we never gave him any reason to hang around (nor did we ‘watch’ him wander around the property – that’s just asking for disaster.  Now we’ve got this young guy sniffing out the chickens.

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