Bears spotted on campus in spring and summer – The Williams Record
As an adult black bear, looking distinctly out of place, strolled down Spring Street on the evening of July 2, it would have been hard to be shocked. By this point, most students living on campus had seen on social media, or heard through word of mouth, that bears had been passing by every now and then since late spring.
On May 15, someone took a photo of a teddy bear walking past Greylock Hall. (At the time, I insisted to my friends that it had to be a weird looking dog and the bears just wouldn’t go there. deceive over and over again.) On May 27, an adult bear was seen square in the middle of Greylock Quad.
On June 3, two particularly large pieces of equipment were placed in a dumpster behind the Susan Hopkins house, where associate professor of economics Owen Ozier photographed them next to bags of garbage. On July 12, a bear was seen walking near Stratton Road, less than a mile east of Currier Quad. August 8 marked another observation of Cubs on campus.
âShe was cute but looked scared,â Tula Schapiro ’22 said of the July 2 bear during the students’ group discussion on the summer campus. It was like a fish out of water. (Or just a bear out of the forest.) Known to be temperamental and non-confrontational, black bears are a strange sort of animal to encroach upon the college’s well-tended campus: benign enough not to cause utter panic, but big and intimidating enough to cause a stir.
Massachusetts has at least 4,500 black bears and counts, according to the state’s Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. While the population is anchored in the western half of the state, there have been sightings even in the Boston suburbs as young men explore beyond their existing territory. In the spring, they emerge from their hibernation and venture out of their dens. Bird feeders and garbage cans attract them to yards. Loud noises and intimidating humans chase them away.
As their population increases and their range expands eastward, their density in the Berkshires appears to have increased. City residents who remember longer than most college students agree that in recent years bears have been seen more frequently in the city.
“In my 25 years of living in Williamstown, I would say there has been a noticeable increase in the number of bears,” wrote Scott Lewis, manager of the Williams Outing Club (WOC), in an email to Save.
WOC deputy director Dave Ackerson, who lives in North Adams, said he has also seen an increase in recent years. âI see probably four or five bears a year right here in Berkshire County,â he said.
While the overwhelming majority of students left campus in March 2020, Noah Savage ’21 .5, from Williamstown, remained in town throughout the spring. Over the summer, he conducted research in the Hopkins Memorial Forest that involved setting up a network of wildlife cameras to create a dataset of animal sightings that could aid in future research. As it happened, the project coincided with an increase in bear sightings around the city – which he said could have been the result of the decrease in noise levels that accompanied the onset of the pandemic. Even as he visited the habitats and animal trails in the forest, the bears visited the streets, lawns and backyards of Williamstown.
âOn a personal level, I was doing this to better understand where I was in the world,â he said of his research. “I was going [the bearsâ] the way they used to go to us is kind of the way i see it. I had the chance to go for a walk on their grass and follow the game trails through the forest.
Savage is also in charge of a nature-centered student group called ‘The Cult’ – which he assured me is just a GroupMe discussion of people with a shared respect for nature, and not an island group of devotees led by a charismatic figure. Past worship activities have literally included trees in their arms.
“The Cult is a chance to build a community around caring that we are not alone in this space, and just respecting that in a non-academic way, [but] in a more spiritual way, âhe said.
Although I haven’t been to any of the Cult’s outings myself, Savage’s description of nature as a source of spirituality has hit home. There is something magical about meeting a wild animal, especially one that looks like it can beat you but will usually decide not to. It offers plenty of opportunities to create meaning and to think for its own place in the natural world – and we are only the last humans to meet them.
Both in symbol and substance, bears feature prominently in the spirituality and culture of the Mohicans Stockbridge-Munsee Band – the tribe that originally inhabited much of the Berkshires. According to resources provided by the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Historic Preservation Office, bears (known in Mohican as “muxkw”) were traditionally considered immortal and were “respected as having the spiritual power to communicate with the heavens and the earth. “. The story of the âGreat Bear Huntâ tribe illustrates the interdependence between bears, humanity and the rest of the natural world:
“The stars of the Big Dipper [Big Dipper] constellation are men in the sky who hunt bears. Hunting begins in the spring and lasts all summer. In the fall, the hunters injure the bear and its blood falls, causing the leaves to redden. In winter the sky the men kill the bear and its fat is the snow which falls on the earth. The approaching summer melts the fat and transforms it into sap which rises in the trees.
The institutional response to a bear sighting in college does not have room for much respect or enthusiasm. Dave Boyer, the former director of Campus Safety Services (CSS), said his office responded to a few calls about a bear on campus last spring. It was the same bear, he said, and he had a predilection for wandering around the Susan Hopkins and Agard houses.
“Our procedure is always to keep bystanders away from the area and allow a bear to return to its natural habitat,” Boyer wrote in an email to Save. âSometimes we’ll use sirens to speed up the process. “
More recently, CSS applied a similar procedure to a rarer visitor: a moose that has been sighted in various locations standing on Cole Field, walking past the Cole Avenue liquor store, and, thanks to sirens, walking away from humans. and entering the Hoosic River. .
For those of us who don’t have mermaids handy, the recommended protocol for dealing with ursine encounters is less sophisticated. Don’t run away, or you might be seen as prey; instead, look tall, make noise, and back away slowly. Bears with cubs tend to be protective and more aggressive than they usually are.
Lewis summed up the guidelines for such situations in a few words: âStay away, but enjoy. “
“If a black bear happens to attack – which is very, very, very rarely – fighting back is the right thing to do,” Ackerson said. An encounter with a bear over the past summer illustrated more typical behavior. âI was walking the Appalachian Trail. I got around the corner – I was heading south and the bear was heading north on the trail⦠we were facing each other about 20 feet, both very surprised, and the bear was just turned around and took off really fast.
Lewis recently experienced an even closer encounter in a neighbor’s yard. âI heard something, I looked up and literally five feet in front of me was a very large black bear climbing heavily up the aisle,â he wrote in an email. âI was a little surprised and said, ‘Hello, mister bear’. The bear looked up, paused for a moment, then continued down the path to the back of the garden. I followed, far behind and quietly, just to watch the bear continue to wander! “
Knowing how to manage the risk inherent in a bear encounter is a prerequisite for getting something else out of it. Savage offered me some recommendations to make the experience meaningful.
“Make sure you respect [the bearâs] distance and stuff like that, âhe said. âBut I would say, take a moment to think about this animal’s perspective on the world and what he’s going through right now. Where could it go, where could it come from, what could it feel like. Is he hungry? Is he looking for something to eat? Does that scare you?
âI like to think of seeing an animal as a gift. It wasn’t just luck that he showed up there⦠Take it as a chance to learn and a chance to see where you are in the world from a different point of view. And that’s kind of a wonderful thing.