Why did the bear cross the road?

It’s been a good while since I last saw a black bear, but Monday evening on my drive home from work I had a good look at a large one crossing the road in front of me. It was heading up Canaan Mountain from Robbins Swamp, and I slowed to see whether it had any young ones coming along behind. About six years ago a bear with two half-grown cubs appeared in front of my car at a similar time of day. But this bear was all on its own and quickly vanished into the undergrowth.

The state of Connecticut maintains a webpage where it lists the number of reports of black bear activity it receives from the public from the current day going back a full year. I see that some towns have hundreds of reports, while Canaan/Falls Village has just 10 and North Canaan only three. Part of the explanation for these low numbers is probably that there are more people in suburban communities to encounter bears and report sitings and fewer places for bears to hide. 

Avon accounts for nearly 10 percent of all bear reports in the last 12 months in Connecticut, but this suburban community has something besides bird feeders and backyard grills that bears find attractive. That long trap rock ridge affords a forested north-south corridor for these animals to use, just as Canaan Mountain offers a very large roaming ground for the bear I saw today. 

I saw this bear when it crossed the interface between its habitat and ours, but while I often see bear sign in the woods I do not encounter them there. I see them where they cross my path, moving across the gap between large areas of open space.

Wide-ranging wildlife require corridors and connections that can bring them into areas that have long been dominated by people and where we compete for the same resources. When I worked in Africa, the issues were how subsistence farmers and elephants could occupy the same territory, sharing in many cases the same limited water supplies and forage areas, without an unacceptable level of conflict pitting the needs of one against the other. 

In those scenarios, the elephants were conserved when they had value to the entire community, poached when they did not. Here the stakes are different, and we coexist — though not always amicably — with bears and beavers, and even creatures such as fishers that conservation biologists long believed would not cross large open areas yet which turn up in fragments of suburbia from time to time.

I enjoyed the few seconds where the bear and I were in the same vicinity, and wished it well on its journey.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at www.greensleeves.typepad.com.