Too close for comfort - hungry bears become neighbourhood threat

A shortage of food in their natural environment has led to black bears searching for food in residential areas. Photo / AP

Starving black bears from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park have been creeping into nearby residential neighbourhoods and tourist areas - climbing up condominium balconies, crawling onto to a school campus and breaking into vehicles.

Wildlife authorities said the animals aren't finding enough food in their own habitat, so they're wandering into ours.

"Unfortunately, food is very scarce this year," park spokeswoman Dana Soehn told the Citizen-Times.

Bear favourites such as wild cherries, acorns, hickory nuts and walnuts are in short supply this season - a periodic problem that's prompted by weather patterns, experts said.

Park spokesman Brent Everitt said that "unfortunately, it's something we can't really tell until we get right on top of that season", so bears are driven to hunt in more precarious spots - garbage cans, barbecue grills and bird feeders, to name a few.

Hungry bears, Everitt said, have been wandering down from the national park into "gateway" communities - including Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Townsend, Tennessee; Bryson City, North Carolina; and Cherokee, North Carolina - to hunt along roadways where natural foods are available.

The National Park Service has issued an alert instructing visitors to stay away and has temporarily shut certain roads to protect the public and allow the bears to feed in their natural habitat.

This is the time when the park's roughly 1500 bears are filling up on food before bedding down for the winter; some of them are known to travel more than 160km from home to find a meal.

Park authorities said that this season, they have seen as many as eight bears to a tree searching for something to eat - a signal that there's a problem.

"That is a sure sign that food is pretty scarce," park wildlife biologist Bill Stiver told the Wall Street Journal.

Black bears have been making their way into neighbourhoods. In September, a resident in Gatlinburg called authorities about a black bear that was climbing up the side of a condominium, NBC affiliate WBIR reported at the time. She told the news station she thought it might have smelled garbage on a balcony.

She said it came back that evening for a second look.

Gatlinburg is nestled in Sevier County, an area with about 95,000 residents, according to the US Census Bureau.

There have been several recent incidents in the area - including one in which a bear tried to climb into a van where a small child was sitting. The events prompted Tennessee wildlife authorities to shoot and kill a mother bear and three cubs last week, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Dan Gibbs, a biologist with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, told the Wall Street Journal that many residents have learned not to feed the bears, but "it only takes one or two to set the whole problem into motion".

The problem, Everitt said, is that once a bear becomes used to breaking into human property and eating human food, it will continue that activity.

"At that point, the only way to move beyond that is to euthanise the bear," he said.

Not only is it dangerous for humans, Everitt said, but it's also bad for the bears, who teach their cubs that the only way to get food is from humans, meaning the cubs cannot survive in the wild.

"It's important that these bears remain wild," he said.

"When they don't, the health of the population begins to decline and then the population begins to shrink."