In The News – This Winter, Let Sleeping Bears Lie (If They’re Actually Sleeping)
January 4, 2025 | Member Submitted
Originally Published in Moonshine Ink, 12/12/2024, Written by Alex Hoeft
Are local bears still hibernating? What’s the trend?
Tahoe’s bears have taken advantage of year-round access to plentiful food due, in large part, to the inability of many humans to secure their trash, remove food from vehicles, close their kitchen doors or windows, and stop deliberately feeding them. Does this mean they no longer hibernate, though?
BEAR League knows most of the bears in all the neighborhoods around Tahoe, so we understand what they are up to. Therefore, we can honestly say for certain that about 80% of the bears do, indeed, go into a den each winter. Unfortunately, about 150 of them choose to den under homes and summer cabins because people refuse to secure their crawl space openings, with the excuse usually being, “No bear has ever gone under there before.” We also get calls when a hiker or someone on snowshoes finds a bear in the woods sleeping under a huge fallen tree … and this is a good thing, so we usually let sleeping bears lie, unless it’s a well- traveled trail, and then we have to ask them to move to a better location.
Photo courtesy of Kristin Derrin