COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Patrick Sullivan was sure it was a “crazy neighbor” honking a car horn nonstop while Sullivan was up feeding his infant son at 3 a.m. one night this summer.
It was a neighbor all right, but not a human one. A black bear had opened the door of a Toyota SUV and gotten trapped inside the vehicle in Gold Hill, northwest of Denver.
In one of hundreds of examples of bears getting into more trouble than usual in the parched Rocky Mountains this summer, the animal kept bumping the horn as it ripped apart the Toyota’s interior, desperately trying to escape.
Millions live in or near bear habitat across the Rockies, where widespread drought has reduced supplies of nuts, berries and plants that bears eat, prompting the animals to roam far and wide for food.
Colorado officials report twice as many bear sightings and conflicts with humans this year compared with the average, including bears roaming where they aren’t normally found.
“Bears aren’t necessarily behaving any differently but they are definitely increasing their activity in the places that they’re looking for food,” said Travis Sauder, a state wildlife officer in southeastern Colorado.
Black bears usually stick to Colorado’s mountains and foothills. This year they’ve been spotted on the plains more than an hour’s drive east of Colorado Springs.
“When they get that far east, there’s just zero natural food sources that they would be looking for, like oaks or chokecherries,” Sauder said.
There are plenty of temptations for hungry bears around homes: pet food in open garages, bird feeders and grease traps under barbecue grills. And then there’s trash in unsecured bins.
by far the biggest attractant behind this year’s surge in bear activity, according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife data.
A few bear-trouble stories are heartwarming, like orphaned cubs successfully released into the wild after time in a rescue facility, where they learned to live on their own without raiding.
“We’ve got to rescue a lot of bear cubs out of trees, including standing on some pretty shaky ladders to pull a bear cub that’s sleeping in a tree,” said Sauder.
Andy Kerrigan, while working on a deck in Steamboat Springs, this summer, found a cub that got into his truck through a window. He banged on the truck to scare it off.
“But it had found my lunch in the seat. And it was like, ‘I’m not going anywhere,’” said Kerrigan, who eventually chased it away with a piece of wood trim.
In Gold Hill, Sullivan’s brother-in-law solved the bear-in-Toyota problem by tugging a rope tied to a door handle. The bear bolted for the woods through the open door.
“It was just sitting there waiting for someone to help him,” Sullivan said. “So I’m glad we could have done that for him.”
