As spring melts the snow pack and the weather warms up, New Hampshire’s approximately 6,000 bears are coming out of hibernation hungry and looking for food.
To keep bears away from residential areas as they wake up, Fish and Game black bear expert Dan Bailey says it's time to put away the bird feeder.
“Making sure that your property is free of any food attractions that may keep a bear around or intentionally attracted into a suburban area and teach that bear that those are good places to find food,” he said. “That's something that we don't want.”
Bailey said bears are active in every town, so it's important to clean up any potential food sources and keep bears from sticking around human areas.
As good omnivores, the most common things bears like to eat include trash, barbeque leftovers, chickens and bird seed. Fish and Game also advises residents to secure their trash in a bear-proof location and keep chickens behind an electrified fence.
In previous years, Bailey would get scattered reports about active bears in the winter. This year, he said he got none
“It's an energetic cost benefit analysis that's going on in their head,” he said. “They're denning up because they're conserving energy. Food is scarce, snow is deep. It takes a lot of energy to find food, so it's more beneficial for them to just wait out those snowy winter conditions.”
This year was an outlier with one of the coldest, snowiest winters in recent memory. But bear hibernation habits are changing over the long term as climate change brings spring earlier and earlier in the season, according to reporting from VT Digger.
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