Bears, and Berries, in Our Midst

From its website:

The foods of summer simply taste better. All black bears have a sweet tooth, and there are lots of summer foods that are sweet. Blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries are all favorites of bears in the U.S. Bears use their lips as tools in plucking only the ripest and sweetest berries off a bush. They will leave the rest for a week or so and return to check on their "crop." They spread berry seeds in their scat and in that way plant new bushes. Black bears are good farmers!

So, despite the alarm a black bear sighting may cause, just think: more berries!

In fact, the bears probably aren’t much interested in humans at all, says Dept. of Environmental Conservation wildlife biologist Matt Merchant. They would rather not make contact with us, as they prefer to keep to their kind. 

Their diet is about 80 percent plant-based. While they seem to get some opportunity—meat in the spring with roadkill animals and new fawns and such—by summer it's berries, berries, berries.

They are big travelers, and much like shoppers at the farmers market, they go for what’s fresh.

Right now is prime berry season for them, said Merchant. The black bears go for raspberries (wine berries in the wild if you’re being exact), blueberries, blackberries. Then it’s onto apples, cherries. Finally, acorns, beechnuts.

The DEC didn’t have a sense of their numbers but thought that the bears have only begun to really settle here in Westchester within the last several years, enough so that they’ve opened bear hunting season East of the Hudson for the first time two years ago. Most of the bears are still only transient here, just moving through what’s abundant to eat. So far, they haven’t caused any nuisance problem; mostly the few sightings just “get a lot of attention," Merchant said.

Many of the advice the DEC gives on coexistence to people is not unlike what they say with coyotes. We don’t want them to become too comfortable eating what they find in our suburban backyards and therefore getting used to human proximity, so don’t use a bird feeder until autumn and winter, don’t leave bear-attractive food for pets and strays outside, and don’t put out garbage long before its due for pick-up.

You also want to look big, stand tall, carry a stick, and be somewhat loud if you cross paths with a bear as they will likely slump off intimidated. “Black bears are among the more timid species, and they want to avoid people as much as possible,” Merchant said.

Meanwhile, I asked on Facebook recently where folks were finding their raspberry patches to pick over, and no one’s fessing up. They seem much more open with their bear sightings.

Ossining’s former mayor, Miguel Hernandez, for instance, went as far as sharing a photo on Facebook of the bear scat he came across in his yard. 

A Croton resident said on the other hand she couldn't say the location of her special raspberry patch because her kids would kill her.

But then there's Tarrytown’s Rob DeRocker who posts regular updates on Facebook of the status of his Wilson Park area crops, which he’ll happily point visitors to.

DeRocker writes:

The hills are alive, with the sound of...raspberries being picked in Tarrytown....Okay, so Julie Andrews had different lyrics. Point is, the fields and woods around Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow are loaded.

No bears there, but certainly plenty of deer.

For more information on bears in our midst, visit the DEC website here.