Smoky Mountains Park visitors get warning as bears range wider for food

Black bears of the Smoky Mountains are starving this fall and their foraging is bringing some of them practically muzzle-to-face with residents and tourists near the most visited national park in the U.S. While bear attacks are rare, officials are concerned and warning people to be careful.

Bears near the park have climbed into cars, ripped open garbage, tried to enter cabins and even chased people. A periodic problem of nature—a collapse of the natural crops of cherries, acorns, hickory nuts and walnuts that bears love to eat—is driving bears out of the park into surrounding areas, said the park’s wildlife biologist Bill Stiver.

The area’s supply of bear nosh is particularly low, probably due in part to random climate factors like late freezes or isolated periods of drought that can impact the trees, he said. Many cubs of the park’s more than 1,500 bears are severely undernourished and their mothers are trying to find food for them, according to biologists, who tracked one bear that walked in the middle of the day through the downtown of Sevierville, Tenn.—about 12 miles from the edge of the national park.

If you encounter a black bear, you should make yourselves “large and loud,” shouting, waving your arms and blowing a whistle if you have one, said Dana Dodd, board president of the Townsend, Tenn.-based Appalachian Bear Rescue, which cares for orphaned or injured black bear cubs until they are healthy enough to return to the wild. “Then back away very slowly. If you run, you can look like prey,” she said. “Everybody with food has to be careful; it’s a desperate situation.”

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