news story / By Heidi Walters

Fieldbrook vs. the bears

Black bears have apparently discovered this sleepy Humboldt gem

(Aug. 5, 2010)  The first night the bear came into Bob Smith’s back yard, in Fieldbrook, it tumbled a few of the small-time beekeeper’s hives. Flattened them and ate the honey and bee larvae. Then it moseyed over to Smiths’ neighbors’ houses, all within a mile or so of the Fieldbrook Family Market, and rumbled garbage cans, trampled fences and smashed up a chicken pen. Smith put his hives back together and rigged around them some bright lights and noise-making stuff — cow bells, wind chimes and other things that rackety-clang, plus a boombox that blared all night.

The second night the bear came, it trashed one more of Smith’s hives — it was too far from the noisemakers and lights. Smith called the California Department of Fish and Game to ask for a depredation permit — a permit to kill the bear. A DFG official told him he could have a permit only if he had documentation proving livestock and property damage by the bear, and only if he had already provided adequate protection of his property — specifically, an electric fence — which the bear had breached.

“So I went out and spent $400 for an electric fence and put it up,” Smith said over the phone Tuesday morning. But some hives were still unprotected. “On the third night, the bear came back and rumbled those,” Smith said.

The bear wandered farther into the hills that night, to a home where, about a month ago, a different bear — which has since been “dealt with” — had killed three dairy goats, two of them pregnant, said Smith. There, it smashed a pig feeder and a rabbit pen and wreaked assorted other havoc.

“So the fourth night I was out in my back yard, sitting in a chair with a rifle across my knees and a spotlight in my hand, waiting for the bear,” Smith said. “And at one point I heard a bunch of dogs barking on Gross Street, where three nights in a row they had their garbage trashed and fences flattened. I went in to watch the 11 o’clock news, and then I came back out and spent the night on guard duty ‘til 6 a.m. The bear never came back.”

But a neighbor called him to say there’d been gunshots at around 11:15 p.m. Was it him? Did he kill the bear? “Wasn’t me,” Smith said.

The thing is, added Smith, this isn’t just business as usual. At least not in downtown Fieldbrook. “In the 35 years I’ve been here, in a typical year there’ll be a couple of bear sightings in town. I know we’ve had some peak years of bear activity, but never in 35 years have I heard of bears killing goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, rabbits, geese.”

Nuno (pronounced “Noon”) Amaral, manager of the Fieldbrook Family Market, said over the phone Tuesday morning that everybody’s talking about the bears. “We just had a customer this morning who said his garbage cans got hit last night, up on Tip Top Ridge, about five or so miles from here.”

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