Can't We All Get Along?

By James Willwerth/Mammoth Lakes

Armed men have surrounded the hilltop hideaway at 255 Ridgecrest Road again. The fugitive, a break-in specialist, won't come out. "I want the s.o.b. to feel some pain," special agent Steve Searles tells two cops with pump shotguns. "I want you to put some hurt on him." Nothing happens when Searles fires his pistol. Nor when he bangs loudly on the porch with a baseball bat. He tries pepper spray, yelling, "Hey, hey, come on out of there! You can't stay there!"

Pandemonium reigns when the outlaw--800 lbs. of overfed, visibly upset black bear--emerges at a dead run from the basement crawl space. One cop fires orange paint, others rubber bullets. Searles shoots self-propelled flash-bang rockets. It may not seem so, but the "eviction" was meant kindly. California law permits the killing of bears caught in private homes. Folks in Mammoth Lakes, however, prefer a "bear spanking." "The meaner I can be," says Searles, who developed this kinder if not gentler approach, "the longer he'll live."

Ask anybody in this tiny (pop. 4,000) mountain ski resort town why you shouldn't feed wild bears, and you'll hear a rueful answer. They move in. For years the residents indulged the neighboring wild bears, treating them as entertainers. Restaurant owners left their garbage Dumpsters open so tourists would gather. Locals like Mammoth Times editor Wally Hofmann brought houseguests. "We'd sit in the car with a bowl of popcorn and wait to see a bear," he remembers. Then the bears stopped going home. They settled down to live in abandoned buildings and started having cubs.

Police Chief Michael Donnelly recalls standing by one night as "eight or nine bears climbed inside some Dumpsters and threw out food that coyotes fought over in a frenzy." He worried about children getting hurt. But killing pesky bears on public-safety grounds raised ethical problems. So he turned to Searles, a local glass contractor experienced in hunting and trapping who once solved a local coyote problem by killing a marauding pack's alpha males.

Searles, an intense, ponytailed Ichabod Crane figure, was asked to study the bears and suggest how everybody could get along. The contractor watched them dine at heavily trafficked Dumpsters for nearly a year. He discovered a culture of dominance in which some ate first and others waited. He watched bears urinate and defecate to mark territories. He consulted biologists, who explained that black bears instinctively climb trees rather than attack.

Searles wrote police agencies, arms manufacturers--and even the Chinese government--looking for scary, nonlethal weapons. His plan was to mix dominance, territorial marking and the animals' fear of confrontation to become, he explained to officials, the city's "baddest bear." Soon he began chasing bears from basements and out of school yards with rubber bullets, pepper spray and pistol-loaded screamer rockets. He shouted threats so each bear remembered him. After a bear left a house, Searles marked the den as off limits by sprinkling it with his own urine. "I get a lot of kidding about that," he admits.

By last year the bears were so settled into urban life that three generations of cubs had arrived. Several families had made homes inside the drainage pipes at the municipal golf course. (Searles calls one cub Par 3.) Stuffed with fatty high-protein garbage, sows were delivering bigger broods. Searles and city officials started pressuring residents and businesses to lock their Dumpsters; 118 remain unlocked, down from 350. The urban bear count has dropped from 40 to 30. "They get less to eat," says Searles, "and we see less bears."

Searles' "bad bear" campaign has had an impact as well. "These bears are learning that this is our den," explains Chief Donnelly. "You can pass through, but you can't forage for food here." Searles proudly asserts that his furry charges are better behaved and safer. "If you see a bear here, he'll run," he says. "We've restored their natural fear of humans."

Walking morning rounds recently, Searles noticed bear tracks in fresh snow near the golf course. He has become an ursine eco-evangelist. "This is the year 2000," he says, "and authorities still kill bears that did nothing wrong. My ambition is to change this." The gangly contractor adds, "Bears have shown they can adapt to us. Why can't we adapt to them?" Within the range of a middling seven-iron shot, at least four bears are adapting.