The call of the wild

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  September 1, 2007

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif.

SO NICE of the black bear to join me for sunrise.

Well, actually, this fur ball, tinted in dusty cinnamon and blond, was thankfully not interested in me for a formal date. It walked right past me in the parking lot at Glacier Point, the incredible ledge at 7,214 feet where you can look down more than a half mile to Yosemite Valley and straight across at 8,842-foot Half Dome.

It walked deliberately to the point. It headed toward a group of tourists who spent the night watching the Perseid meteor showers last month. The tourists, who obviously took the many bear warnings in Yosemite as a mere suggestion, had food and a bottle of wine with them. With its incredible sense of smell, the bear ambled up to them. With its sheer size scaring everyone back several feet, it licked at a banana peel and fondled a bottle of pomegranate juice.

When sunrise was over, I headed down to the valley. A crowd was around a tree in the Curry Village tent area and campground. Another black bear was high up in the tree, eating apples. A ranger kept everyone back as shaken apples splattered the ground. When the bear came down, the ranger chased it back into the woods.

Two bear sightings in broad daylight in the same day, one in the high country and one way below, prompted me to call the park to ask about the level of interaction between bears and humans in the park. When bears get used to eating human food, they can become a nuisance - and a danger.

Despite what I saw, Yosemite is in the midst of a success story in avoiding such interaction.

By this point of the summer a decade ago, Yosemite had 1,227 bear incidents, which caused $537,000 in damage to vehicles, camping gear, and so on, according to park ranger Adrienne Freeman. Bears found human sources of food to be their McDonald's. "If the choice is between 1,000 acorns or Twinkies, they'll take the Twinkies," Freeman said. A bear needs to eat 1,000 acorns a day to meet its required 20,000 calories.

Since then, the park has received extra funding, currently $500,000 a year, to manage the bears and educate the public about how not to attract them. Bear incidents dropped dramatically. This year, at summer's end, the incidents number only 319, with $57,000 in damage. Despite the tourists at Glacier Point, Freeman said happily over the telephone, "It shows you what can be done."

With only a little extra effort.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.