Museum spotlights state's black bears

Museum spotlights N.C.'s black bears

DURHAM -- On Sunday, 3-year-old Jake Kumnick watched a creature his own age and about six times his size scurry down a tree head first.

Jake then helped fetch the black bear a breakfast of berries, nuts and yams and got close enough to cuddle.

Jake and his sister Kally Kumnick helped kick off a salute to black bears at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham as part of a national bear awareness week. The museum is holding a weeklong program aimed to salute the resilient creature that's been remarkably gracious as North Carolinians push further and further into its turf.

"This is one of the fastest-growing states in the country, and we're getting into their space," said Sherry Samuels, the museum's animal department director. "This human-bear interaction will just be more and more as the years pass."

The Kumnick family was eager for the chance to visit with the museum's resident black bears, a clan of four that found homes on an acre of terrain at the museum after being orphaned or abandoned by ill-advised pet owners. The museum kicked off its bear awareness week Sunday with a behind-the-scenes tour of the bears' digs. Through Saturday, the museum will feature talks from bear experts, craft activities for children and a hunt for bears in the stars at the museum's planetarium.

Taking back the land

The black bears made a home in North Carolina before the earliest colonial settlers. Despite the black bears' head start, they retreated into the state's two edges: the coast and the mountains.

The early settlers were tough on the black bear -- hunting them, degrading their habitat and scaring them into remote areas. The bear ceded its turf bit by bit, moving away as people etched out homes on land that the bear had roamed for hundreds of years.

The population dwindled over the years, but it has rebounded since the 1970s. By last count in 2005, about 4,000 black bears lived in the western part of the state, while another 7,000 or so claimed the coast as home. Their range has now stretched beyond 10 million acres in North Carolina.

The black bears are starting to wander back to the congested Piedmont area, but sightings there and in urban areas such as the Triangle or Charlotte are rare. A police officer in Thomasville shot a black bear in 2007 after it wandered into a yard where children were playing. In 2005, Orange County's animal control warned residents to be on the lookout for a bear. One unlucky bear wandered into Durham a year and a half ago and found his fate on the other side of a gun, Samuels said.

Bears do, from time to time, journey beyond their homes in the mountains or coast.

"Sometimes, he'll make a right turn instead of left and unfortunately end up in Raleigh or Charlotte," said Dr. Roger Powell, a North Carolina State University zoology professor who specializes in black bears.

Now and again, that's when an unsuspecting hiker will spot a black bear in the likes of the Triangle.

It's always been legal to hunt a black bear, though the state now limits that to the fall. Black bear experts say that hunting keeps the population in check, but a half-million acres of designated "sanctuary," or hunting-free zones, allow the population to continue thriving. The bears are savvy enough to know where their havens are, and many retreat there when fall comes, Powell said.

The black bear population is healthy in this state, though the pace of development in mountain and coastal areas could mean more unwelcome encounters with the bears. So, if you're planning on building that dream cabin in the mountains, prepare yourself for the sight of a bear sleeping under your porch or tasting your trash.