Bears, too, finding R.I. a good place to settle down

PROVIDENCE — With bear sightings on the rise, Rhode Island environmental officials say it now appears that several adult males have made a permanent home in the state.

In past years, the Department of Environmental Management concluded that any bears seen around Rhode Island were probably juvenile males that had been pushed out of dens and wandered in from Connecticut or Massachusetts, where numbers of the large omnivorous mammal are booming.

But bears spotted this spring in, among other places, Johnston, West Greenwich, Narragansett and, most recently, Warwick and Cranston, are bigger males that have already entered adulthood, said Charlie Brown, a wildlife biologist with the DEM’s Division of Fish and Wildlife.

“Which may suggest that we’re at the point that these adult males have become established here, that they consider Rhode Island part of their territory,” Brown said Monday.

The DEM's Division of Law Enforcement logs all bear sightings people call in and confirms many of them through site visits. From 2015 to 2018, the number of sightings averaged 71 per year. So far this year, there have been 98.

It’s not just the number of sightings or the geographic range of locations where bears have been seen that point to a resident bear population in Rhode Island for the first time since before 1800. It’s also the timing of sightings.

In previous years, the first bears in the state weren’t spotted until June, many weeks after they would have come out of hibernation. But this year’s first sighting occurred in March, which wouldn’t have given any bear much time to travel far after emerging from its long winter sleep.

“They’re probably not just transient bears from Connecticut and Massachusetts anymore,” said DEM spokesman Michael Healey.

The DEM theorizes that there are at least three bears living in Rhode Island. One has most recently been hanging around Ashaway village in Hopkinton. It’s the same bear that a woman photographed last month near Camp Varnum in Narragansett after she locked herself in her car. The photos clearly showed a bear larger than a juvenile, Brown said.

A second bear has been seen around the Arcadia Management Area in Exeter. It’s easily identifiable by a couple of white marks in its fur.

And a third bear was spotted in Warwick and West Warwick on Sunday before moving on Monday into Cranston, where its presence caused Hope Highlands Middle School to activate a “shelter-in-place” protocol. There were no reports of encounters between the bear and students or staff.

Black bearsare believed to have been common in the forests of Rhode Island when the first European settlers arrived in the late 1600s. But colonists cleared about two-thirds of the state’s forestland for agriculture, drastically reducing the amount of bear habitat. Hunting pushed the animal’s population over the edge, and bears disappeared from the state in the 18th century.

The decline of farming in southern New England and resulting reforestation, combined with conservation protections adopted in the 1900s, gradually fostered a revival of bear populations. Today, it’s estimated that Massachusetts has about 4,500 bears and Connecticut has as many as 1,000.

Because male bears carve out territories that range in size from 12 to 60 square miles, as the animal’s population expands, so too must its range. Rhode Island, which is 59 percent forested, is on the leading edge of that expansion.

“We’re sort of the frontier,” Brown said.

The males that have established territory here will eventually want to breed, which could lead them back to Connecticut or Massachusetts. Although there has been more than one sighting of a female bear with cubs in Rhode Island in recent years, nobody has found a den in the state yet.

It’s only a matter of time before females, too, make a home in Rhode Island. The bear population will inevitably grow in the state.

With the number still low, the bears in Rhode Island have the freedom to roam long distances in search of food. And the easiest pickings are found in backyard bird feeders, with their ready supplies of fatty, protein-rich seeds.

In areas where bears have been sighted, the DEM is urging people to remove their feeders and wait to put them back up again until early November. Other recommendations include taking garbage out the morning of trash collection and not the night before, keeping barbecue grills clean of grease, and refraining from feeding pets outside. Report any sightings to the DEM’s Division of Law Enforcement at 222-3070.

Bears are rarely aggressive to people, so the DEM isn’t counseling people to stay out of the woods. But it is asking Rhode Islanders to be aware of the state’s newest residents.

“We think this is the new normal for Rhode Island,” Healey said.

akuffner@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @KuffnerAlex