West Virginia Wildlife from Eyewitness News

Nuisance Bears

Be careful about what you leave out, the bears are back.

March 25, 2009
Reporter: Patrick McMurtry
Videographer: Brad Rice

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Now that its spring --- bears are out of their dens spending most of their time in search of food. Because of this - the DNR would like to encourage everyone to take a few precautions in avoiding nuisance problems which could lead to the destruction of this great animal

Colin Carpenter/DNR Bear Biologist says:
"What we have here is a large male nuisance bear. We just happened to meet here at the Dairy Queen and he came out to the food source at the dumpster. There are two dumpsters here at the DQ, one of the dumpsters is secure, the other has plastic lids and they're getting trash out of the dumpster."

Colin says this area has been a big problem for nuisance bears for around 20 years. You can see all the trash, and if you look across the creek, you'll see another bear digging around. Two bears within twenty yards at the same time. This is the first time this has been caught on tape

This is probably a 230 pound male. This is something any hunter would like to find out in the woods, but unfortunately, today we found him by a dumpster. When you have a situation like this, an innocent animal feeding at a dumpster, it really doesn't leave the dnr biologists very many options.

Colin Carpenter/DNR Bear Biologist says:
"The options are relocate the animal, we can scare the animal with rubber bullets or shell crackers but that doesn't really work that well if the food source is still there. If that doesn't work, euthanasia.

We're at a point now in WV where there are black bears everywhere and a lot of the time you move an animal and it returns, and two, you're putting an animal where it hasn't lived before and animals have an established home range."

Colin says his office handles more than 600 nuisance bear calls a year. He says many times people just don't think about what they're doing, and their habits are putting these magnificent animals at risk.
"People need to understand we live in bear country. it doesn't matter if you live in downtown Charleston or downtown Beckely, we trap bears in downtown beckely every year.

Bird feeders, trash cans, people need to put away their bird feeders in the spring until the fall. the other thing they can do is put your trash out the morning of pick up."

By putting forth a little bit of effort, you just might be keeping the state's largest animals out of harms way. For West Virginia Wildlife, I'm Patrick McMurtry, Eyewitness News.