High Points: The Bear Necessities

Twenty-two thousand calories! That’s a lot of choke cherries.

But, according to Rachael Gonzalez, the public information officer for Colorado Parks and Wildlife who was interviewed for an article in Tuesday’s Aspen Times by Westley Crouch, that’s the amount of calories your average bear is trying to consume every day as he/she/they prepares for the soon-to-be-here winter season. The bears are going through “hyperphagia,” the scientific term that describes the frenzy of feeding that occurs this time of year which can bring a bear up to 1.5 times their mid-summer weight.

Need a little perspective on just how much 22,000 calories is?

Earlier this month in a match-up for the ages, uber-eater Joey Chestnut defeated Takeru Kobayashi in a highly anticipated but bear-ly competitive hot dog eating contest by consuming a world record 83 hot dogs and buns in the allotted 10 minutes. Kobayashi could only down 66 dogs. The point? A physiologist named James Smoliga from High Point University in North Carolina (no I’m not making that up) once determined that eating 83 hot dogs — a figure he considered to be the limits of human consumption — would be right around 23,000 calories.

So, your average bear, of which there are hundreds in this Valley right now, eats with the relentless appetite of a Joey Chestnut. Insatiable is the only way to describe it.  

In the 30 years I have been in the Valley, I have read a lot of articles in local papers about the interactions between bears and humans. But Crouch’s piece was filled with facts and statistics that I had never heard before.

For example, I didn’t know that “Bears have an incredibly keen sense of smell, 2,100 times more than humans and seven times more than bloodhounds, according to the National Institution of Environmental Health Sciences.” That’s a prodigious proboscis. Or that bears will keep trying to open a metal dumpster for up to “two to three weeks” if they think there is a food source to be had.

Perhaps most notable was the figure about this year’s increase in bear activity. According to  Crouch’s article, Pitkin County received 463 bear reports, with 173 involving food and non-food source property damage, from June 1 to September 5. That’s nearly five reports a day for the entire summer.

Just about everyone I know has seen a bear this season. At our house in Old Snowmass we had a family, three cubs and a sow, check into the trees surrounding our home for two days as they literally stripped the berries from the limbs. We watched them climb high in the bushes and pull off clusters of choke cherries from the branches. They were a docile bunch, but we knew that staying clear of a momma and her cubs is the prudent thing to do no matter how adorable the little ones may have seemed.

I guess the most important thing to remember is that the bears aren’t interested in you, they are interested in your food. We, all of us, need to do everything we can to ensure that our actions do not attract our furry friends. If you don’t have bear-resistant trash containers, then don’t put out the trash until pick-up day. Don’t leave food in your cars and be sure to lock the doors and roll up the windows. Don’t leave household doors and windows open that bears can gain access to.

We know that we need to be bear aware. In this Valley it is a bear necessity.