Fatal Black Bear Attacks

While we're on the topic of risks that might be encountered in the woods, I recently came across an article in the Journal of Wildlife Management entitled "Fatal Attacks by American Black Bear on People: 1900-2009." The authors (Herrero, Higgins, Cardoza, Hajduk, and Smith) dredged through all the data they could find regarding fatal black bear attacks in North American for the past 110 years and reached some interesting conclusions. Perhaps the most important thing to note is that fatal black bear attacks are extremely rare—63 people killed in all of North America over 110 years—given that there are hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of thousands of bears sharing the continent.

Beyond that, two other facts caught my attention. First, in more than half the fatal cases, the bear's behavior was predatory. That is, the bear was initiating contact with people as though they were prey. I always thought that bear attacks were largely defensive—and they can be—but, the majority of the time, they are not. Second, predatory bears are almost always male (92%—which shoots down my thinking that grouchy bears are generally female bears. So, there you have it, more people have been killed by predatory male black bears in North America in the last century than by females defending their cubs.

When I was a kid, a female bear (with cubs) came into my family's remote camp one night looking for food. We were unable to drive her off until she got what she wanted, which involved climbing above our bear bag and pulling it up into the tree with a hand over hand (paw over paw?) motion. We'd been demonstrably out-smarted and out-maneuvered. Through it all, her behavior was relatively aggressive—snarling at as we tried to pelt her with firewood. I took that to mean that she was dangerous. She may have been dangerous, but far less dangerous than a predatory (silent stalking) male. The authors of this study conclude: "[I]f an aggressive female with young is encountered, a predatory attack is extremely unlikely since most predatory attacks by black bear were by single male bear."