The giant pear tree looming over a West Boulder property doesn’t have a whole lot of fruit on it. But four-year-old Luca Crocker is determined.
“Get it higher! Get it higher! Daddy, get it higher, now!” Luca Crocker says.
“All right, we're gonna extend this one up,” his father, Tom Crocker, says as he raises the wire picker pole. “Oh, I see it up there.”
It takes a bit of finagling, but Tom and Luca Crocker hook the wire basket around a ripe and juicy pear, and they pull it down from the branches.
“You got a pear! What do you think? Is it any good?” Tom Crocker says.
“Good,” Luca Crocker says as he walks over to the black bucket on the ground and drops it in.
They’re visiting this home as volunteers for Community Fruit Rescue. The group has two goals: reduce food waste and remove common attractants for bears, such as pears and apples.
Laura Lammers lives here with her husband, Devin. She said they see bears a couple of times a week.
“When we sit out in our living room here, we can look out in the backyard and see him grazing on the apples on the ground,” she said. “A week ago, I was watering the plants out front, and a little cub walked up behind me. In that case, I just dropped the hose, screamed and ran.”
Their neighbors have similar stories – bears popping open trash cans, climbing trees. And those stories are starting to add up.
Bear encounters are common in Boulder County. Over the past five years, there have been more than 1,200 in the area, according to data from Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Around 500 of those involve some sort of food source property damage. And that’s only the incidents that are reported.
This is happening because people are moving closer to wildlife habitats. Plus, weather patterns have disrupted bears’ food supply - so they occasionally go searching for meals in more urban areas.
Devin Lammers in West Boulder believes efforts like fruit removal help, but there’s more to it.
“I think this is just one small piece of why bears are here,” he said. “It's gonna take probably a lot more than clearing a few fruit trees to probably meaningfully change that.”
Bears are smart and lazy. They need 20,000 calories a day to prepare for their winter hibernation. During this time, called hyperphagia, the Boulder foothills are a buffet. So they’ll go into trash cans and apple trees to fatten up, since it’s quicker and easier than hunting all day.
They’ve sought out Boulder’s fruit for years because it’s been dependable. Around a century ago, the city used to be home to around 2,000 apple trees. There’s only a couple hundred left now, but they’re still a prime food source.
“Bears, like people, like apples, they can fill up on them,” Amy Dunbar-Wallis with the Boulder Apple Tree Project said. “Typically, the bears get really interested (in the apples) when it's time to get fat and to hibernate. And bears also want easy access to things.”
Weather has also been a factor driving them into town. Jason Duetsch is the Area 2 Wildlife Manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife – which stretches from Denver to Fort Collins and from the Continental Divide out to Morgan County. He said late freezes in their natural habitat can destroy blossoms. That hurts their food supply and drives more encounters.
“If we see conflict rising, when we look back at our data, we can typically tie that or correlate that back to, ‘Oh, like, remember that that year we had some late frost, or more cold temperatures?’” he said.
These factors are having a major impact. Currently, Boulder County has the most bear conflicts in the region he oversees. City and wildlife leaders have taken steps to reduce these interactions, including bear-resistant trash can requirements and bear relocation. But Duetsch said it’s not as simple as one solution.
“There's a lot of people in Boulder County, there's a lot of people recreating…we have a ton of new people moving in,” he said. “And those bears are going to be drawn towards places where they can make an easier living.”
That’s apparent in the Lammers’ backyard in Boulder. Melanie Hill, who leads Community Fruit Rescue, is helping with the fruit picking at the home near the foothills. In the process, she found two piles of bear scat right next to where the Lammers’ kids play. The scat is full of what they eat.
“It's a lot of seeds, it's apples, it's chokecherries, trash,” she said. “That’s a really good one.”
In her fruit picking work, she’s seen bear activity as far east as Longmont and Lafayette. There’s currently a waitlist for people who want their fruit harvested.
“We just don't want the bears to stay and get too comfortable,” she said. “So if they're going to come into town, we just want it to be short and they go back.”
Hill said it’s better for everyone if bears stay in their natural habitat.
“It's fine until it's not,” she said. “People are really wowed by seeing a bear. I still am. Anytime you see a bear, especially in town, you're like, ‘Oh my gosh, that is so cool. That's amazing.’ But then it becomes a problem. The bear is not leaving your property.”
Hill and her volunteers will keep harvesting trees usually through late fall, right around when bears end hyperphagia and start their slumber.
KUNC's Isabella Escobedo contributed to this story.
This story is the first piece of a three-part series on what happens when people and wildlife collide and how they can coexist. Read more stories from Crossing Paths.
