For about the first 10 years or so after my wife and I moved to this area in 1995, we never saw a bear — unless you count the ones on exhibit at the WNC Nature Center.

Didn’t see one while hiking on weekends. Not on the 40-acre apple farm in Edneyville we lived on for two-plus years. And certainly not milling around our suburban neighborhood nestled between I-26 and Hendersonville Road, where we’ve lived for 27 years.

The first bear we saw “in the wild,” so to speak, was a mama and her two cubs who had shinnied up a big pine tree behind the Omni Grove Park Inn, where we’d taken our two boys to see the gingerbread houses before Christmas. Hey, it was outdoors and uncaged, so we counted it as a wild sighting.

Nowadays, we western North Carolina residents, particularly those of us in Buncombe and Henderson counties, see bears everywhere — strolling through the neighborhood, hanging out on people’s porches, knocking over trash cans on garbage day, ordering honey ham at the Ingles deli. 

Perhaps I exaggerate on the last one, but not by much.

Further down in this column, I’m going to tell you about a local family that had an experience with a mama bear and five cubs that included two of the cubs literally climbing up the humans’ bodies in search of food or comfort. That’s not an exaggeration.

On July 4, my wife and I were walking our two dogs in our neighborhood when Grace spotted a decent-sized bear nonchalantly strolling up the street toward us. As a group of adults and children were gathered in front of the house we were near, we joined them in their yard.

The bruin approached, veered off toward a backyard, then opted to just cross the street and walk around all of us. What struck me was how casual we all were — the bear, the kids who actually moved closer to it, the parents who kept an eye on their kids but didn’t freak out. 

Judging by my friends on Facebook, this is happening all over our area. Lots of bear encounters, every day, in the cities and towns, and in the country. Just in the last week I’ve seen videos or pictures of bears pulling garbage out of rolling bins and Dumpsters, bears with multiple cubs sauntering through back yards, bears checking out the porch furniture. My wife saw a video of a mama bear with six cubs in Maggie Valley.

Six.

They usually give birth to two or three, but as the N.C. State/N.C. Wildlife Resources Urban/Suburban Black Bear Study in Asheville has shown, our bears are getting more calories from human-based food, and that gives their bodies the green light to make more babies.

Lots of bears in WNC, lots of bear encounters

We have a lot of bears around here.

“We estimate that there are 8,000 to 9,000 black bears in western North Carolina, which includes the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” Colleen Olfenbuttel, a wildlife biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (WRC), told me via email.

By comparison, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado has an estimated 20 to 35 bears in the entire park, according to the National Park Service. So you have way more chances of a bear encounter here than there.

Olfenbuttel added that “a very conservative estimate of bears in Asheville and the Asheville watershed would be about 500-600 bears, but likely there are more bears. Some feel there are at least 1,000 bears.”

Not surprisingly, we account for a lot of the state’s human-bear encounters in North Carolina, according to Ashley Hobbs, a special projects biologist with WRC.

“Reported human-bear interactions to our agency are consistently high in Buncombe County,” Hobbs said via email. “We usually account for around one-third of the state’s total bear reports annually.”

Statewide, the WRC recorded 2,740 bear-related calls in 2024, with the most coming from Buncombe County — 1,110. Henderson County had 115 calls.

No fatal bear attacks have been recorded in WNC, not counting federal jurisdictions such as the Blue Ridge Parkway or the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Hobbs said. 

“Since 2009, there have been several confirmed injuries from interactions with black bears in Buncombe County,” Hobbs said. “It is still rare, but it’s becoming more common in recent years.”

The overwhelming majority of these incidents involve off-leash dogs and were found to be defensive in nature, resulting in relatively minor injuries.”

That trend holds true statewide.

Olfenbuttel said the NCWRC started recording incidents in which a bear was reported to have made contact with a person in 2007, when she became the bear biologist. Since then, they’ve recorded 32 reports of a bear contacting a person, with seven of those being hunting-related.

These stats are telling:

• Of the 25 non-hunting reports, 64 percent involved dogs (I’d like to pause here and thank my two doofus pups for not going crazy when we saw the July 4th bear. I think they were just stunned by the size of what they probably thought was a dog).

• In 56 percent of reports that didn’t involve dogs, the WRC confirmed that human-related foods (bird feeders, unsecured trash, feeding of wildlife, feeding of outdoor cats) played a role.

• All 25 non-hunting reports occurred in western North Carolina — 64 percent in Buncombe County and 8 percent in Henderson.

• 56 percent of these reports occurred in the last 5 years.

‘They are losing their wildness’

I asked Olfenbuttel and Hobbs what their “worst-case scenario” is with all these bear-human interactions, and a bear population that just seems to keep growing.

The availability of all the human-related food, called “anthropogenic foods” — whether it’s trash, bird feeders or direct feeding of wildlife in Buncombe County — “has led to black bears being unnaturally disconnected from changes in natural food abundance, such as acorns and berries,” Olfenbuttel said.

The abundance of natural foods can influence if a female has cubs in a given year, the number of cubs a female bear will have, and age of first reproduction, which in turn, all helps with management of bear population levels, she added.

“In addition, the amount of available anthropogenic foods is changing bear behavior as well; they are losing their natural wariness of people — they are losing their wildness,” Olfenbuttel said. “That is why being BearWise is so important; living responsibly with bears by implementing the BearWise Basics keeps people safe and bears wild.”

We’ve talked about this before, but let’s review the basics of the “BearWise” program: 

• Never feed or approach bears.
• Remove bird feeders when bears are active.
• Never leave pet food outdoors.
• Clean and store grills.
• Alert neighbors to bear activity.

Hobbs was pretty blunt in her worst-case scenario assessment, and she’d like to see some action taken.

“The worst case-scenario for Buncombe county/Asheville is that someone is eventually seriously injured by a bear,” Hobbs said. “With our increasingly high densities of bears and people and our increasing levels of development, I encourage our community to take swift and thorough action to better coexist with bears.”

She’d like to see us follow the lead of communities such as Boulder, Colorado, and Highlands, North Carolina, “both of which have implemented ordinances requiring bear-resistant garbage receptacles.

“Recent studies have shown that implementing bear-resistant garbage receptacles on a large scale can reduce reported human-bear interactions by over 50 percent and significantly improve the confidence of residents to enjoy recreating outdoors in their community,” Hobbs said. “Asheville and Buncombe both have a high demand among residents for bear-resistant garbage carts, but availability of these carts is often low.”

[To get on the waiting list for a bear-resistant trash cart, the City asks residents to please fill out this form.]

Hobbs said she realizes that increasing funding for these carts may be tough in the wake of Helene, “but I hope it remains a priority to residents and local officials alike.”

Mama bear denning under their back porch

Now, about that family with the body-climbing bears.

Mercedes and Chris Irving, who live in the Reynolds/Cane Creek area south of Asheville, have had a much closer encounter with bears than most folks around here. That’s because most people haven’t had desperately hungry baby bears literally climb up their bodies in a panic.

Some background is in order. Last December, the Irvings discovered a bear had opted to den under their rarely used back porch.

In February, they discovered the bear was female and had birthed three cubs. That made mama bear a little testy.

The Irvings have a two level house, with half of the downstairs being subterranean. Mercedes Irving had taken visiting friends to the deck to show them where Helene’s floodwaters had reached.

“There’s a small deck down there, and the dogs were out,” Chris Iving said. “There’s a run that’s fenced in, and one of them (the dogs) poked their head under the deck there, and the deck like, growled. And it shook — it just shook the deck.”

That would be the mama bear growl.

The Irvings are used to bears at their house, in which they’ve lived since 2021. Chris Irving estimates 8 to 10 different bears mosey through their yard several times a year, and they half-joke about their yard being a “bear highway.”

They haven’t had any ugly encounters with them, though, unless you want to count an ornery, older bear that was missing some fur and gave “a couple of gruff warnings” to get the dogs in check.

“I think that’s the principal thing that we kind of deal with up here — that we can’t let the dogs run free, because the bears are up here too,” Chris Irving said. “That’s just a situation where things (could) get volatile.”

“They’ve never shown any aggression towards us whatsoever,” Mercedes Irving said.

Chris Irving said about a half-dozen times they’ve walked out to find a bear sitting next to the car, situations that resolved themselves without incident. He describes their lives there as “a cohabitation situation” with the bears.

But the mama bear under the deck, with her three cubs, had pulled out a vent cover leading to a crawl space under the house, and some of the insulation encapsulation was compromised.

“The bear had opened up the crawl space,” Chris Irving said, noting he was worried the cubs might get stuck in there or damage it. 

The Irvings had called Wildlife Resources last fall to ask what to do with the bear, and called again after they realized she’d had cubs. They were told to just leave mama and cubs alone until April, when they would most likely venture off on their own.

The bear family did emerge in the spring, initially sticking to a small fenced-run area. 

“She would just even plop down and nurse them in front of us, literally feet from our window,” Mercedes Irving said. “It was amazing.”

The humans and bears seemed to have a healthy respect for each others’ space, Mercedes Irving said. 

“She seemed to feel safe, and we felt safe, and we got to experience a National Geographic sort of thing outside our window for a few weeks,” Mercedes Irving said. “It was a really cool experience. It’s kind of scary, but cool. And she never showed any aggression to us at all.”

Orphaned cubs

But things got a little more complicated when Wildlife Resources asked if they could place two orphaned cubs with the mom so she could raise them in the wild. The orphans had come from a situation where they were being bottle fed and had been inside a person’s house.

On April 9, WRC workers brought the two orphaned cubs to place with the mama bear. The Irvings said the biologist explained that the mother bear would decide pretty quickly whether to accept the cubs or not. 

“And three hours later, we had two screaming cubs in the driveway and starving,” Mercedes Irving said. “They plopped them right in there, and she took them in.”

All went well until April 16, when their teenaged daughter called them and said the two orphan cubs were in the driveway, climbing on her car. 

Chris Irving said he called in a couple of friends, and they rounded up some dog crates. They found the two orphan bears in the backyard, screaming bloody murder. 

“We got them contained in these dog crates,” Chris Irving said.

They called the biologists, but it was about 7:30 at night, and it took about 30 minutes to get a call back. Ultimately, they were told it was paramount to get the cubs back into the woods where mama could find them.

“So we tried to put them in the woods and scare them off, but they were very persistent in chasing us down,” Chris Irving said. “You’ve never seen three 50-year-old men run from these tiny things — they are about the size of a small handbag.”

One of the friends drawn in to help with the job, David Sandridge, described the scenario as “a very nerve-wracking situation.”

“It was very unsettling, with that kind of proximity, because we weren’t sure if the mother bear was anywhere close and if she would charge,” Sandridge told me. “There’s a lot of things that I know to do — and some things I know not to do — and one of the things I know not to do is to handle a baby bear cub.”

That is 100 percent correct.

Cubs climb human’s pantleg

I think we all remember the unfortunate incident in April 2024 at an apartment complex in the Reynolds area where residents pulled baby cubs from a tree and posed for pictures. The bears had to be removed from that situation but were able to be rehabilitated and released back into the wild.

Sandridge and Irving said they had no intent to handle the cubs. They just wanted to shoo them back into the woods.

“What was surprising to me is just how quickly the bear was able to (climb),” Sandridge said. “It was on my ankle, and then within like a split second, it was on my knee. And then it kind of leapt from my knee to my body. Those things, they’re strong, and their nails are shockingly long.”

Chris Irving said he realized how bad the situation would’ve looked to an outsider, but he assured me they know not to handle bear cubs.

“The truth of the matter is that animal is at his foot, and then you blink your eye and it’s at his face,” Chris Irving said. “It’s a situation that you’re trying to handle as safely and responsibly as you can. And, you know, sometimes it’s a little messy.”

Mercedes Irving quickly added, ‘It looks all cuddly and cozy, but these guys were petrified.”

Eventually, they got the cubs in the woods, and they believe the mother bear reclaimed them. They are not sure how things ultimately worked out for the orphan bears, but they’re hopeful they’re still bonded with their adopted mom. (I asked Wildlife Resources about the orphans’ placement with the surrogate mother, and their fate, but didn’t hear back by deadline).

The Irvings are not the kind of people who anthropomorphize bears (give them human characteristics), and they noted that Wildlife Resources strongly encouraged them to close off the denning area by their house, which they’ve done. But they also know just how many bears we have around here, and that they’re not going anywhere.

“You can get comfortable in your interactions with these things,” Chris Irving said. “And ultimately, they’re giant wild animals, and it’s best if you just educate yourself on that and respect them as having ownership over that space.”

Sandridge, who grew up in western North Carolina, has a house in Biltmore Forest, where he and his family also have had plenty of bear interactions. He’s respectful of the animals, but with so many roaming around in the city and the county, he does worry about interactions turning unfortunate, or even violent.

“I think it’s just a matter of time. There is a comfort level there,” Sandridge said, noting that they’re beautiful animals, and we admire them from the time we’re kids clutching our teddy bears to go to sleep. “I think there is a little bit of a desensitization to it.”

“A fed bear is a dead bear”

Keep in mind that bears that get too comfortable around us and start coming into homes in search of food may have to be euthanized. “A fed bear is a dead bear,” the saying goes.

Last fall, four bears in Swannanoa were euthanized, including two cubs, after the animals broke into two homes in Swannanoa, ransacking one and causing extensive damage. Hobbs said people living nearby had been intentionally feeding bears birdseed.

Olfenbuttel said euthanization of bears is rare, “especially when compared to other states, but is increasing, largely due to the availability of anthropogenic foods.” Bears eating our food lose their natural wariness of people and identify neighborhoods and homes as sources for food, she noted.

If the Wildlife Resources Commission decides to euthanize a black bear, “it is because we have determined that the bear is dangerous to people,” Olfenbuttel said, citing bears that repeatedly force entry into an occupied home.

“Our biological staff decides to capture and euthanize a bear after much investigation, thought, and discussion, and it is a decision we don’t take lightly,” Olfenbuttel said, noting that biologists get into the field to conserve and help wildlife, not euthanize animals.

Please, do not feed the bears, folks.

The key here, to me, is our behavior. We, as people, are becoming too comfortable around the bears. 

Bears are just being bears, and we need to stay away — and not feed them — as best we can. So let’s all review those BearWise tips one more time, and hope our cities and counties start looking at making bear-proof trash cans the norm.

If you have a bear problem, contact the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission Help Line at 866-318-2401 or HWI@ncwildlife.org

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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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