Colorado issues warning that “bears are gonna bear”

With warmer months ahead, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) is reminding campers that hungry black bears fresh out of hibernation are on the prowl for food—and their meals should never come from a “human-provided” source.

“We’ve received 173 reports of bear activity in 25 [Colorado] counties this year,” CPW wrote on Twitter Friday. “Bears should NOT be eating from trash receptacles, bird feeders or other human-provided food sources.”

“Bears are gonna bear—people are the solution—change your habits,” the department added.

The reminder came alongside a video of a black bear that was captured opening the back door of a worker’s pickup truck and climbing inside the vehicle. In the clip, the bear dumps a drink cooler onto the ground and eventually runs off with a lunch box that it found in the back seat, clenched between its jaws.

“In case you were looking for a sign to lock your car doors—this is it,” CPW said alongside the video. The footage was originally posted to Facebook in July 2020 by J&B Landscape.

The video had over 1.2 million views as of Friday evening, and Twitter users had some fun responses to the post. The Walton County Sheriff’s Office, which encompasses part of the Emerald Coast in Florida, responded to CPW’s clip: “This bear is more intelligent than some humans.”

CPW retorted, “bears are really smart!”

Another user teased about wanting to attract the animal, writing, “So if I leave my doors unlocked, I get a bear?”

“We don’t recommend that,” CPW responded.

According to Matt Yamashita, CPW’s wildlife manager for the area covering Aspen, when a bear learns to get access to a “treat” through a human-linked source, such as a bird feeder or a trash can, the animal starts to think “that people mean food.”

“People who think that it’s one time, no big deal, are totally wrong,” Yamashita said in a press release from CPW Friday. “It is a big deal when you compound that ‘one time’ with how many ‘one timers’ they get from your neighbors, too. It adds up.”

According to the release, the first wave of bears that emerge out of hibernation are typically males, followed by female bears that did not give birth to cubs over the winter months. Natural food sources for the animals would typically “include grasses, aspen buds and other vegetative matter that is beginning to sprout,” CPW said, which are helpful for the bear’s dormant digestive system.

“Their bodies are needing to adjust to the fact that they haven’t consumed anything for sometimes six months,” said Mark Vieira, carnivore and furbearer program manager for CPW, according to the release. “So there is this phase that is referred to sometimes as walking hibernation, where they are out on the landscape moving slowly and eating what tends to be more vegetative material that starts to pass through their system to get their bodies ready for early summer food sources. That is when they will move back into the typical omnivore diet that we see bears eating the rest of the year.”

CPW noted that humans most often interact with bears in the late summer and fall. However, if there is a lack of natural food available for the animal when it wakes up out of hibernation hungry, bears can be “more persistent in their search for human-food sources.”

“Starting with proper bear aware practices in the spring may help prevent bears from discovering your home or neighborhood as a food source that it will return to throughout the year,” read the release.

Travelers and residents in Colorado can practice “bear-proofing” their homes and campsites by securing potential bear attractants, such as garbage cans, garage doors, grills and compost piles. CPW officials also recommend that residents do not hang bird feeders between April 15 and November 15, writing that they are “a major source of bear/human conflicts.”

According to data from CPW, the most bear interactions in Colorado last year occurred near Aspen, the popular ski-resort/vacation town, with 1,011 reports and 745 sightings recorded for the year. In general, the Northwest United States reports the most bear encounters each year, although all areas of the U.S. experience a peak in bear reports during July and August, the department said.

Populations of black bears can be found throughout the U.S., specifically along the Rocky and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, according to the National Park Service.

Newsweek has reached out to CPW’s press team for more information.