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  Hazing refers to the practice of supplying a frightening or painful experience such that the animal associates the unpleasantness with the location or the behavior underway when it began, and then avoids such in the future. In the case of these two bears, you’d need to station someone here in the alley during the wee hours with an implement of less lethal unpleasantness,† most likely a gun that shoots rubber ammunition or bean bags. If you are a law enforcement ignoramus like me, you may be picturing the colorful handsewn item tossed at holes from a distance or juggled by clowns. These bean bags are smaller, about the size of a walnut. They don’t penetrate skin, or hide, but they smart.

  “Hazing is never going to solve this,” says Breck. The bigger bear rips deeper into his garbage bag. “There’s too much to be gained.” How well hazing works depends on the push and pull of risk and benefit. These bears have learned that a visit to this alley is likely to offer a caloric windfall. Weighed against those calories, the risk of another smack to the flank would be a risk worth taking. “And there’s too much other stuff nearby,” says Breck. “If you were to haze these bears right here, they’d just go over to the next alley.”

  When hazing does work, it generally does not do so for long. In 2004, a team of Nevada wildlife biologists assessed the effectiveness of hazing black bears in an urban locale. One group of bears was hazed with rubber bullets, pepper spray, and loud noises, and another group got all that plus a barking Karelian bear dog to run it off. A control group was not hazed. In terms of how much time passed before the bears returned, neither group stayed away significantly longer than the group that hadn’t been hazed. All but five bears out of the sixty-two followed in the study showed up again eventually, and 70 percent were back in fewer than forty days.

  Breck spent many a late night trying to haze bears during an epidemic of car break-ins at Yosemite campgrounds. Between 2001 and 2007, eleven hundred automobiles were broken into by bears. (Minivans were hit most often. While it’s possible some structural weakness contributed, Breck believes it had more to do with what minivans typically hold: kids, lots of them, spilling juice, dropping crumbs, grinding chips into the footwells. He guesses the bears were keying in to the smells of this “micro-trash.”) Hazing efforts proved futile. “Once they learn what’s inside … forget it.” The bears quickly came to recognize the sound of Breck’s truck. They’d take off when they heard it coming, and go back when they heard it drive away.

  It turned out that fewer than five bears—sows and their cubs—were behind the break-ins. This is typical. From the start of the year to the September of my visit, bears in Snowmass have broken into houses through unlocked doors or windows sixty times. Wildlife-camera images have implicated just four bears. A bear research scientist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Dave Garshelis, told me about a call he got from a National Guard camp where bears were raiding pallets of military rations called MREs, which bears apparently enjoy more than soldiers do. He was told that around a hundred bears were raiding the supplies. “The guy said, ‘I’ll bring you to this place where you look across to this ridge that is completely pockmarked with bear dens.’ I was like, ‘This sounds cool.’ ” The “dens” turned out to be natural landscape features, and “a hundred bears” in fact was three.

  Great, so just trap the few brigands and deliver them deep into the forest, and your troubles are over, no? Say hello to the disappointing reality of translocation. Adult black bears rarely stay put where they’re released. They have made their way home in journeys as lengthy as 142 miles—in one case including a 6-mile ocean swim. It is a remarkable achievement given that, unlike migrating birds, they can’t rely on internal magneto-gadgetry to help them navigate. Whether they are picking up sensory cues—the smell of the ocean, say, or the sound of an airport—or just trying out different directions until something feels familiar, is not known, but they are motivated and they are good at it.

  In a 2014 study, sixty-six conflict bears were radio-collared and translocated by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Thirty-three percent of the adults made their way back to the spot where they’d been captured, and none of the subadult bears did. Those read as fairly optimistic statistics; however, if you define success not as the failure to return but rather as surviving a year in the new home, the picture is less rosy. Translocated bears often wander into a new town close to where they’ve been released and start getting into the same kind of trouble. More than 40 percent of translocated bears in Yellowstone National Park and 66 percent in Montana were involved in another “nuisance event” within two years. Yosemite rangers tried translocating the bears that were breaking into cars, moving them to the other side of the park. The result: car break-ins on the other side of the park.

  Another factor is at play in the decision. Were a person to be seriously harmed by a translocated animal in its new location, the agency that brought it there could be held partly liable. The Arizona Game and Fish Department settled out of court for $4.5 million after a bear they’d translocated mauled a young girl at a campsite.

  Dave Garshelis has worked with humans and bears for almost forty years. I asked him, by phone, how he felt about translocation. “People think this is a kind thing to do, but I’m not sure it is all that kind,” he said. Often it’s sows with cubs that get into trouble, because they need the most food. “Here she is living in her home range, teaching her cubs where the foods are. Now all of a sudden you plop her down somewhere else that she’s completely unfamiliar with. With a whole bunch of other bears which she’s competing with for food. You’re injecting them into a social system they’re not familiar with.” When bear biologists from the state of Washington surveyed forty-eight U.S. wildlife agencies, 75 percent said they sometimes translocate problem bears, but only 15 percent believed it was an effective way to resolve the problem. It’s more often done in high-profile cases, when media attention has put the animal and the agency in the spotlight. Generally speaking, translocation is a better tool for managing the public than it is for managing bears.

  The most promising candidates are young bears translocated early in their “criminal” careers. This is partly because yearlings are less inclined, or less able, to find their way back, but mainly because dumpster diving is a gateway crime. Next comes breaking and entering, burglary, home invasion. As garbage-eaters become habituated to humans, as they start to associate them with jackpots of food, the risk-benefit ratio shifts. Less perceived risk, dependable benefits. Why stop with the metal boxes in the restaurant back alleys? Why not get inside the big boxes in the hills with the enticing cooking smells? Since the end of hibernation, in April, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has had 421 calls about Pitkin County bears damaging property while going after people’s food. Most of these calls go to District Wildlife Manager Kurtis Tesch, whom Breck and I are meeting up with tomorrow.

  The darker bear, perhaps weary of being harried by its dominant associate, has snagged a bag and run up a short set of steps. We follow it up and around a corner, to the upper level of a swank mini-mall. Ordinarily, I would take delight in the optical non sequitur of a bear standing in front of a Louis Vuitton boutique. This poor goober with the burrata on its snout, innocent and utterly unaware of its likely fate, makes me want to cry.

  Kurtis Tesch has bear stories, but maybe not the kind you expect. The things that stay with him are not the displays of strength or violence but rather the intelligence and occasional unexpected lightness of touch. The bear that unwrapped the foil on a Hershey’s Kiss. A bear that stood up, grasped a door on either side and pulled it from its frame, then carefully leaned it up against the house.

  “They’ll reach in and take things out of the fridge, like eggs, and set them aside without breaking any.” We are on the way to the scene of a break-in high on a ridge road, Kurtis and Breck and myself, careening around switchbacks in Kurtis’s cluttered, thrumming CPW truck. An egg wouldn’t last long in here.

  Black bears are keeping Kurtis unusually busy this year.
This was unexpected, because the spring was wet; human-bear conflicts are typically thought to intensify with drought, not with plentiful rain. But the year before was very dry, and Kurtis says he’s heard that drought spurs some plants to produce an excess of reproductive material, or “mast”—fruit, seeds, berries, acorns—and then less of it the following year. “They’re trying to spread their seed, thinking that they’re about to die off. And then when a wet year comes, they’re more concerned about growing.” I don’t know if that’s what has happened here, but I like this worldview of trees that worry and prioritize and plan for their demise.

  From the back seat, Breck volunteers that the general trend toward warmer temperatures also contributes, by shortening the length of the bears’ hibernation. In a 2017 study, he and six CPW biologists radio-collared 51 adult black bears and monitored the timing and duration of their hibernation, along with environmental factors. For every 1.8-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature, hibernation shortened by about a week. Based on current climate change projections, black bears of the year 2050 will be hibernating 15 to 40 days less than they are now. That’s 15 to 40 more days out on the landscape looking for food. Add “more bear break-ins” to the list of possible consequences of climate change.

  Food supply also affects hibernation. In a year of plentiful food, bears hibernate for shorter periods. For a bear that starts relying on human-sourced foods, every year is a plentiful year. Breck found that bears that foraged mostly urban areas hibernated a full month less than bears that foraged the natural landscape. Another concerning consequence of plentiful food is that reproduction rates rise. Black bear sows have a reproductive option called delayed implantation. Fertilized eggs become clusters of cells, called blastocysts, that loiter in the uterus over the summer. Whether they implant in it come fall—and how many of them do so—depends on the mother’s health and how well she’s been eating.

  We’ve arrived at the driveway of our destination. From here, the house looks to be of average size. Turns out this is because most of what we’re looking at is garage. The house pours down the mountainside two, three, I don’t know how many stories. Breck steps down from the truck and walks to the edge of the blacktop. I assume he’s marveling at the view, but as I walk over I hear him calling out the names of bushes and trees growing wild around the house, the ones black bears feed on: serviceberry, chokecherry, oak.

  “Yup,” says Kurtis. “This is some of the best bear habitat in Colorado. We moved into their habitat. You know?” Kurtis wears reflective orange-tinted sunglasses that stay on his face the whole time we’re with him. He’s light-haired and fit, with a good jawline, and that’s as far as I can take you.

  The owners of the house have been out of town. The house-keeper, Carmen, discovered the break-in and called the police, who in turn called Kurtis. Carmen lets us in and takes us downstairs to the entry point: a floor-to-ceiling window in a bedroom with its own deck. She says it was locked, but bears can wedge their claws into any small gap in a window frame and pry the unit out. An interior screen window lies on the carpet. The wall-to-wall is white, but the bear left no tracks. Nor, Carmen says, did it knock anything over on its way upstairs to the refrigerator. You get the sense that if there’d been a mop handy, it would have cleaned up the kitchen floor.

  This bear reminds Breck of one that was breaking into Aspen homes back when his study was underway here. They called him Fat Albert. “He was just kinda laid-back. He’d gently open a door of a cabin, go in, eat some food, and leave. People would go, ‘Wow, he didn’t destroy my place at all.’ ” That’s why he was fat, and that’s why he was alive. There’s more tolerance for a bear like that. An aggressive bear that trashes the place or otherwise makes homeowners feel violated and in danger is very quickly going to be, to use Breck’s word, whacked. The upside, if it can be said there is one, is that natural selection favors the Fat Alberts. Aggressive bears are likely to be put down before they have much opportunity to pass on their genes.

  With a growing percentage of Fat Alberts, will coexistence eventually become a possibility? Or even a policy? Could we live with bears in the backyard the way we live with raccoons and skunks? I posed this question to Mario Klip, a bear specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) in the Lake Tahoe region. Many people in his area already do, he said. Say a couple of homeowners find a bear under the deck. Rather than call Fish and Wildlife, they may call the Bear League, a local advocacy group. “They’ll send someone out to crawl under and poke it with a stick and get it to run off, and then help board up the space for you.”

  Klip practices coexistence with the BEAR League. “They are,” he points out, “filling a vacuum.” More and more people want nonlethal options for bears that trespass or break into houses. And not just Californians. Dave Garshelis works in rural northern Minnesota, where most people have guns and are allowed—encouraged, even—to solve their bear problems themselves. “I’ve been here thirty-six years,” Garshelis told me. “I can sense a sea change in attitudes to bears.”

  What would happen if wildlife managers did nothing, if they stopped destroying the recidivist bears? The fear is this: Those bears’ cubs will learn to break into homes, and ditto those cubs’ cubs. As break-ins escalate, tolerance erodes. As Garshelis put it, “It’s hard to be tolerant when there’s a bear in your kitchen.”

  Back upstairs, Carmen describes the scene as she found it. The bear appears to have gone straight to the refrigerator. It opened the door, pulled out and scarfed a tub of cottage cheese, broke a bottle of maple syrup and a jar of honey and lapped those up, and then moved on to a pint of Häagen-Dazs in the freezer. (Pitkin County bears consistently prefer premium brands. “They will not touch Western Family ice cream,” Tina White reports.)

  Behind us a set of French doors leads to another deck. Carmen found these doors open and assumes this is where the intruder left the house. French door handles, locked or unlocked, are so easy for black bears to open that they’re known as “bear handles” and are prohibited by local building code. But people like them, and do-it-yourselfers either don’t know or don’t care about the finer points of building code, and Kurtis sees them everywhere. Hollow doorknobs are likewise prohibited; bears crush and grip them in their teeth and easily turn them. (Some businesses make things even easier. Automatic doors open for bears, too.)

  Kurtis thinks we may be looking at the work of two different bears. The first one entered and exited through the downstairs bedroom window, and a different bear came up to the French doors on the kitchen deck and smelled or saw the aftermath of the first pillage. His reasoning is based on the position of the doors as Carmen found them: opened inward. It would be unusual, he says, for a bear to pull a door inward in order to pass through. It’s also possible the same bear returned to the scene a second time. Kurtis says they often come back at least once.

  Like human burglars, bears typically break in when the homeowners are away. Given the large percentage of Aspen properties that are let as vacation rentals part of the year, empty homes are easy for bears to find. With bolder bears, burglary may escalate to home invasion. Often the bear comes in while people are asleep, especially, Kurtis says, when it’s hot and someone has left the windows open. Or a sliding door is left unlocked. Sometimes the residents are not asleep. “We’ve had people eating dinner at their table and the bear walks in, grabs some food off the table, and runs back outside. We’ve had bears ripping doors or windows out while people are in there, hiding in their bedroom or bathroom.”

  Kurtis gives Carmen his card and tells her to have the owners call him if they want a live trap set. She doesn’t ask him what would happen to a bear that ends up in the trap. Colorado Parks and Wildlife, like many state wildlife agencies, has a two-strike policy. If Kurtis gets a call about a bear nosing around someone’s trash or hanging out in a back yard, say, he will attempt to trap it, and if he succeeds, he’ll ear-tag it and take it into the woods and release it and hope it doesn’t
come back. (A trap is left in place no more than three days, to lower the odds of trapping the wrong bear.) Often the trap stays empty. “We’re not catching them like we used to,” Kurtis confided later. “I don’t know if they’ve just gotten smarter, or what the deal is.”

  The bear that broke in here would not be granted a second strike. Because it’s breaking into locked windows, and will likely continue to do so—and, if it’s a sow, teach its cubs to do so—the agency considers it a threat to public safety. Kurtis says people often decline to report break-ins, because they know their call may set in motion a death sentence for the bear. The black bear is a ridiculously lovable species. There’s a reason kids have teddy bears, not teddy goats or teddy eels.

  “So what would happen if you were to trap this bear?” We’re climbing back into the truck now, to head back to town. I notice a lint roller in the door caddy, as if sometimes bears sat up front in the cab.

  “When you do trap the right one and take it out,” Kurtis says, “you notice a slight decrease in break-ins in the area. For a short period of time. And eventually another bear comes in and takes over. So.”

  “It’s a temporary solution,” says Breck. “You’re just mowing the grass.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I was asking about. I was more asking about the “taking out.” I’m going to have to be more direct. “And it can’t be fun to have to put down a bear.” All these euphemisms.‡ Taking out. Putting down. Are we killing an animal or unloading a truck?

  “No, it’s not,” Kurtis says flatly. “Last week I had to put down a sow and a cub.” The pair were repeatedly breaking into houses. “And that is not fun. At all.” We drive along in a grim quiet broken intermittently by the walkie-talkie clearing its throat.