I stepped out on the porch one morning last week to see why the neighbor’s chickens were raising such a ruckus.  ”Bears!” I called to my husband.  ”There are bears across the creek!”

I ran for my camera while Peter walked down the hill to take a look.  As the chickens got louder he yelled, “Kathy, they’ve let the chickens out and they’re killing them all!”

Camera in hand I ran down the hill towards the mama bear and her cub, yelling in my deepest voice, “Run away bears!  Run away bears!”  From our side of the creek, we chased them until they grabbed one chicken and turned to run.  They ran under the bridge, and paused under a tree with a captured chicken before crossing the creek and heading into another neighbor’s horse pasture while I continued to yell at them from the top of the bridge.

I called the Colorado Division of Wildlife to let them know we had bears in the neighborhood.  It happens sometimes in the fall, even though we’re close to town, only about 3 miles from the nearest KMart.  The woman I spoke to said, “Well, they haven’t really done anything bad, it’s just a chicken, so we don’t really need to file a report.”

“Actually, what we have is a sow teaching her cub that it’s ok to hunt chickens in broad daylight in human habitat,” I told her.  ”If that’s what the cub learns, he might start to do damage and then it’s likely you’ll have to come out and catch him and even kill him.  So this isn’t something good for him to learn.”

She filled out a report, which she added to an hour later when the sow and cub returned to catch another chicken and haul it away.  The chicken owners weren’t at home so another neighbor and I ran the bears off, yelling “Run away bears! Run away bears!” in our deepest voices.  We gathered the chickens and locked them in their coop where they’ve stayed ever since.

The wildlife officer arrived within 30 minutes, in time to see the bears checking out the chicken coop again.  Her technique for teaching bears was the same as mine, lots of yelling and running after them, though she had the option of shooting them with non-lethal pellets.  The rest of the training method involves reducing the food source for the bears.  We keep our trash cans in the garage until trash day arrives, keep the chickens locked up, and pick up the apples and pears as they drop off the trees.

The bears are still around because this is great habitat for them.  With the Big Thompson River about 200 yards from our back door, the Buckhorn Creek on the east end of our 3 acres, and an irrigation ditch at the west end, all the water means there is lots of forage and shelter.  The evening my assistant Leah came to check her wedding ceremony location by the river, the bears were back and we all chased them, treeing the cub in one tree and the sow in another.  Even in the tree she was intimidating, whoofing at us until we decided to walk away.

The mama bear and her cub ran up this tree and then stopped to check me out.

And then there are the human mistakes that keep them coming back.  One day last week I was headed to a Leah’s-wedding-related errand, wearing heels and a dress.  As I stepped out the front door, I glanced toward our workshop, about 100 yards away.  There were the sow and cub sleeping in the workshop driveway.  I ran back in to get my camera, and then running across the lawn in my heels, yelling “Run away bears! Run away bears!” I chased them off.

It was my own fault they were there.  I had a bag of grain in the workshop that had begun to mold and I couldn’t feed it to my goats (polioencephalomylacia and all).  In a fit of cleaning last week, I dragged it into the driveway, planning to throw it in the compost, but I was interrupted by another chore and then I forgot it there.  The bears had torn it open, eaten a great deal of it, pooped all over the lawn, and were sleeping it off in the driveway.  I treed them behind our irrigation pond, and then went on to run my errand.  An hour later, I was dragging the trash can to the workshop when the bears came back, and again ran away.

Actually, we can’t train the bears not to eat chickens.  They’ll eat them if they can.  All we can teach them is that it isn’t safe to do it when we can see them.  To do that we make being near us uncomfortable by chasing them, and setting up electric fences around the chicken coop.  Then it’s up to us to reduce the overall appeal of the habitat by putting trash away, and keeping fruit and veggies cleaned up.  So we’re learning from the bears too.  The folks in the neighborhood kind of like knowing that the bears are nearby, so we’re doing our part to live and let live.  And sometimes that’s all the teaching that can be done.

The sow climbed a little higher in the tree until she could face me. Her whoofing is definitely a little intimidating.

All we’re doing is going with the flow of how our bears learn what to do in their environment.  And that’s pretty much what I’m doing when I’m teaching cows to eat weeds.  Since I know how they choose what to eat, I introduce things in a way that fits with their learning style.  It makes it easier on both of us, and much more successful too.