SOME FRONT PORCH TROUBLESHOOTING
Published in the July 26 Edition.
“This is way more awful than the public knows, and it’s not about the bears at the Mayor’s house,” Steve Searles told me as I sat on his porch Wednesday.
It’d been about eleven months to the day since I sat across from him in the same spot after the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) killed Victor the bear, the late four-footed alpha of the lakes basin who swiped a camping tourist. It felt like Déjà vu.
Searles is known across the globe as the “Bear Whisperer,” and known locally as the Former Mammoth Lakes Wildlife Officer. But he insists he’s “nobody” each time I interview him.
Still, he was a centerpiece in last week’s front page story, in which Lunch detailed how Mayor Bubser sent CDFW to trap two yearling bears who’d roamed her property. In the wake of the drama, he’d invited me to his home to chat.
“We never see each other under normal circumstances,” he’d joked when I climbed his front steps to sit in the same seat many others have sat before: big-time reporters, rabbis, addicts, activists, and as of last week, Mayor Bubser.
Holding a cigarette between his fingers, and reading from a yellow paper pad on his lap, he’d prepared for my visit. I told him I’d seen one of the yearlings on Hill Street the day before. So had anyone else living in Old Mammoth, Searles said, as he’d been the recipient of endless photos of the bears throughout the week.
“[The yearling] could see where he was born from where they dropped him off (behind the Motocross track). He just walked straight home,” he said.
We talked for hours, wavering sometimes from the topic of bears but coming back repeatedly to the topic of relocation. He has a strong hunch the CDFW has been trapping more and more bears, and has a stronger hunch these relocations are usually a box to check before killing the bears once reported again.
I probably would’ve accepted it as just a hunch, but someone arrived at Searles’ steps amidst our conversation as evidence to his point. It was a Knolls resident, seeking advice from Searles as he grappled with the decision of whether or not to call CDFW to trap a frequent visitor to his own home: a sow with two cubs.
Below is a summary of the conversation, which I edited for length and clarity.
Visitor: I feel like I’m pretty good with bears. We have had issues in the past, but we solved it. This one is getting in through locked doors, and that seems like the next kind of step up. I’ve had a bear come in the window before, last year. I left the window open. My fault. This year, it pushed against a dead bolted door. It’s a double door, and it broke the pin at the top and was able to slip the dead bolt and come in.
*The bear came back on Monday when he was walking his dog, and she bluff charged him when he arrived back at the house.
Obviously, I don’t want to fuck with her after that. She comes back a lot, though, so I don’t really know what the next steps are here. I didn’t want to just kneejerk relocate the bear. I know that’s not super effective. They are issuing me a non-lethal permit, and I’m going to use a paintball gun, I guess. I ordered one on Amazon that’ll be here pretty soon. I also ordered the little pepper balls.
Searles: Look, I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your home and your dog and your bear. And I’m flattered and humbled that you would come and ask my advice, this is what’s going on all over town and all these people are contacting me.
I’m old. I’ve lived here for 48 years. Relocation was done before I worked with my first bear. They all used barrel traps, and they had zero success. So Alaska, Canada, all across North America … they don’t use barrel traps anymore, except for really weird, one-off situations. So, this is opposite of what science is or what the people in the community want.
The bears, these are wild animals. You’re either correcting their behavior or killing them. I can tell that you know what the big picture is, what the truth is, and you’re not the one dropping the ball. There’s all kinds of toys to make this go away. They didn’t offer you any of them. They told you to order your own shit on Amazon.
If you feel like you have no other option because they’re tying your hands, you can barrel trap the bear. Or, you can believe what I’m saying.
Visitor: I feel like right now, there’s not a right answer. I already called CDFW. I said, “Hey, let’s pump the brakes, let me try to deal with my own shit before we go to that extreme, because it didn’t end well for the mayor.” At the same time, this bear is not responding like other bears have, and I have a two year old, and my wife’s pregnant. I got to defend my family.
If I start educating this bear with a paintball gun, does it go back to being a wild bear, or does it just bother my neighbor? Is it already a problem?
Searles: If you could put a GoPro on the sow’s head and see what she’s experiencing with her neighbors, a lot of people up there like to feed them. And what she’s seen in town, police have arrived and done nothing.
If we could watch her GoPro video, there’d be no surprise that she likes to go in your fridge. It didn’t start at your house. Things have gone on, unreported, and not dealt with. They’re smart. Smarter than a dog or a horse. They learn bad or good very quickly.
We know from decades of trial and error, what works, what doesn’t, and we are intentionally, willfully with malice, going down the wrong road.
Visitor: I hope that this bear can be educated and stay away. But I’m concerned about the cubs. She’s teaching the cubs to break into houses.
Searles: Fathers don’t teach cubs anything. Nothing. So when I was in uniform, I worked through five generations of bears. I’m a lazy man. I taught the teachers to teach, and everyone taught that I was the teacher teaching the students. I did a con job. I taught the mother bears to teach the cubs. So you’re exactly right, and you’re no bear guy. And this you know instinctively, intuitively, what you’re saying is the truth.
*He talked about Victor, and how with proper hazing, the bear likely wouldn’t have caused problems. And now, because Victor was the chief resident of the lakes basin, other bears are competing for his former territory.
As we pull the bears out, bears from everywhere come out of the forest, thinking, “This is Candyland. We have golf courses, we have flowers, grubs, koi ponds. This is badass.”
They’re all flooding in to compete for the land. Now we’re going to have a rodeo that nobody wants to see. We’re going to be on national news on a regular basis because we displaced the entire local population that had learned generationally how to live here. They don’t have a sense of the land. Of traffic patterns. What time the bars close, what Bluesapalooza is. They’ve never seen that shit before. They’re just going to raise hell.
*The conversation then divulged into tactical advice, as Searles offered a number of devices the visitor could try to use to haze the bear, ranging from ping pong balls to cherry bombs.
Visitor: My wife and I have talked about it, and we’re gonna give it at least a week [to call CDFW for trapping] unless some serious escalation happens.
Searles: I’m holding back the tears. You should not have to do this. There’s no reason for you to be treated this way. You shouldn’t have to learn about bears. You can live peacefully and be totally ignorant of bears. So when you say thank you to me, it falls on deaf ears. I’m ashamed and embarrassed about what’s going on.
Visitor: It does seem to be a growing problem.
Searles: It’s gonna get worse. We’re going 100 miles an hour the wrong way. A social experiment that none of us wanted to be in has been kicked off.
Visitor: Why? Why are they doing this? Aren’t they creating more work for themselves?
Searles: We have so many problems in this town, county, state, nation, world. There’s a bunch of shit to be afraid of for your children. Your fears are well founded. We didn’t have a problem, and they decided to make one.
We are worldwide the number one place for coexistence with black bears. And our little po-dog town decided to fuck this up.
