The first blow landed behind my head, a thump on the outside of the cabin vigorous enough to jolt my eyes open. Then came the second, a whack by my feet that shot me upright beneath my sleeping bag.
Frozen still, I could hear the deep, ragged breaths of whatever was on the other side of the wall, only inches of plywood between us. A black, coarse mass of fur brushed past one window, then the next. Every single footfall crunched as it clambered onto the front deck, where I could finally make out its face in the dark. It was the bear.
I’d first seen it an hour before through the kitchen window. Hearing a bang in the yard, I assumed a deer had knocked something over, until I caught its round ears and glowing eyes in the beam of my flashlight. As I brushed my teeth at the sink, I watched it dig into the site of an old compost pile, buried under a layer of dead leaves and soil. We’d stopped using it that summer, worried about an unusual number of troublesome bears in town.
It was August 2023, and I was alone at my family’s northern Ontario cabin, a little blue one-room shack in a clearing on the edge of the forest by Lake Huron. There were more black bears in the area than people when the last ursine census was taken in 2011 — we only outnumber them on Canada Day and August long weekends. Aside from a few times where bears got a little too comfortable in town or were shot during hunting season, we mostly coexisted just fine. We tried not to attract them; they fled when they ran into us. This one, which looked a bit smaller than a fully grown adult, didn’t seem too concerned with me and my flashlight. So I let it be, climbed into bed and tried to drift off to sleep. I figured the bear would move on soon. In nearly three decades of summer visits to the cabin, I’d never had a problem with them. It was the first time one had wandered onto the deck.
I tried to tell myself not to panic. Maybe the bear just bumped into the cabin by accident, I thought. The bear proved me wrong with another robust thump, this one aimed squarely at the front door. Then another. Another. Another. Did I double-lock it before turning in for the night? Yes. But just inside the door was a flimsier screen door, and each blow from the bear was strong enough to pop it open, its hinges creaking as it snapped shut. The floor beneath my feet shook. Can a bear bust through solid wood?
The cabin was half a kilometre from town. If I screamed, no one would hear me. I fumbled around for my phone. The odds of me actually reaching anyone were slim — cell service rarely covers the cabin and even when it does, it’s too weak for calls. I texted a friend’s dad up the road. “This is Emma,” I typed with shaking hands, hitting send. “Bear is at my camp and trying to get in.” Send. “Help help help.” Send. The first message went through but the others bounced back. I was alone, with little more than a kitchen knife to defend myself.
We don’t keep guns at the camp. I don’t know how to use one, and I’ve often joked that I’d be more likely to hurt myself than anything else. No one around here carries bear spray, either. A few times over the years, I wondered if I should buy a canister but dismissed the thought. These were timid black bears, not grizzlies. Only paranoid city people would be worried about bears, I thought, and I was determined not to be one of them.
Without other weapons, my best defence was an air horn a family friend loaned me earlier in the week after a bear appeared at my driveway, locking eyes with me before taking off down the road. Black bears startle so easily that, most of the time, a loud noise sends them scurrying back into the bush. I’d been keeping the air horn next to the door so I wouldn’t forget to grab it when I went out — the same door that now had a bear banging on it. I inched up to the woodstove, seizing the poker like a sword. I lunged toward the door and snagged the air horn before retreating to the centre of the room, hammering on the button to activate the noise.
With the first blast, the bear retreated off the deck and out of my view. But after a few more, the horn ran out of air. I probably should have started banging on pots and pans. Instead I reached for the radio, which had an emergency siren setting. I turned on CBC by mistake, blasting staticky jazz on maximum volume for a minute before I found the right dial. Not only am I going to die, I’m going to die because I’m stupid. I fired off increasingly desperate texts to my friend’s dad. “It’s banging at the door,” I wrote. “Help help help.” None of them went through.
Outside, I could see the outline of the bear in the moonlight, pacing by the woodpile. I wondered how many more blows it would need to shatter the door. An enormous paw would crack through splintered wood, claws shredding the screen like tissue paper. I would have to run out the side door and sprint to the four-wheeler, or maybe try to slip out the back. My phone buzzed in my hand. It was my friend’s dad, who had guessed why I was texting him in the middle of the night.
I heard his four-wheeler start in the distance, almost teary with relief as the sound drew closer. As he roared into the driveway, a gun slung over his shoulder, the bear bit into the handle of an empty, tightly sealed garbage can, another item we’d stopped using to avoid attracting bears. It took off into the woods behind the cabin at an awkward gallop, the bin still clenched between its teeth as it melted back into the night.
I know this was a freak event. Black bears are usually harmless. They’re skittish, bashful. They’re often more afraid of us than we are of them. Problem bears are uncommon in Ontario, attacks rare. If they do become aggressive, it’s usually because people have been careless with food, conditioning them to return for future meals. I’ve read the fact sheets and the studies and statistics. Since the incident, I’ve even forced myself to watch cute videos of them, as if seeing bears sit sweetly at picnic tables and stare curiously into a trail camera could undo the fear that had lodged itself in my chest.
I spent my entire life up to that summer feeling like my family had a social contract with the bears. We did our best not to leave out things that could attract them, or so I thought. We warned them when we were coming, making plenty of noise when we were out in the bush. In return, it always seemed they were happy to leave us alone. We weren’t friends or even friendly, but we didn’t need to worry about defending ourselves either. Once, a sow and cub accidentally blundered into camp while my mom was there alone — she banged on a pan with a wooden spoon and they quickly scurried away. That’s the way this was supposed to work.
But that summer, something fundamental shifted, at least for me. Was the long-held contract between us and them starting to fray?
In the days after my bear encounter, I felt like the creature was the one who reneged on our deal. In reality, the bears have probably been feeling that way about us for a long time. As cities push outwards, people have whittled away at their habitat and tempted them closer with new sources of tasty, calorie-dense eats. Climate change, which is disrupting bears’ food supplies and natural rhythms, raises the risk of clashes even more. Though the provincial government has tried to manage the relationship, mostly by reinstating a controversial spring bear hunt, research shows the number of animals harvested has no effect on the number of human-bear interactions that end badly.
What happened that August could have unfolded almost anywhere in Ontario, where the vast majority of the province is bear country. More and more, our two species are rubbing shoulders in ever-closer proximity, uneasy neighbours separated by thin walls.
Ontario has the second-largest population of black bears in North America, yet we seem to be uniquely bad at living with them. For one thing, we complain about them an awful lot. One 2007 study from the International Association for Bear Research and Management looked at how often people in different jurisdictions reported problematic bear encounters to government agencies in a single year. Ontario topped the list with 10,000. Quebec, for comparison, recorded a fraction of that with 1,156. The most common complaint from Ontarians wasn’t seeing an aggressive bear — it was seeing a bear at all.
Nearly always, our perception of bears as dangerous beasts is wrong, a false idea that can be traced back to the European colonization of North America. Most encounters between humans and bears end with both sides unharmed. Indigenous nations across the continent have long had different relationships with their ursine neighbours — in Anishinaabe culture, for example, bears are protectors.
Settlers have rarely treated them with that same respect, and although the province has one placed atop its coat of arms, Ontario’s history is littered with dubious anecdotes. Take the story behind the children’s book character Winnie the Pooh, which was based on a real black bear cub from White River, Ont. A soldier bought her from a trapper on a train platform there in 1914, toting her along with a Canadian cavalry regiment posted in England for a few years before depositing her to the London Zoo, an ocean away from home — where a monument now tells her story.
Up until 1961, the Ontario government considered black bears vermin, and for a while even offered a bounty for killing them. After hunters pushed for bears to be valued and managed, the province moved to recognize them as a game species like deer or moose, giving them defined hunting seasons and setting rules for how to harvest them. But difficulties continued: in 2007, The Globe and Mail reported staff from the Ministry of Natural Resources had quietly been piling the carcasses of nuisance bears at dump sites rather than distributing them deep in the woods as they’re meant to. Former NDP MP Charlie Angus questioned at the time whether the government’s only plan for handling bears was to “shoot, shovel and shut up.”
Shooting bears, or at least allowing them to be hunted, is still a cornerstone of Ontario’s strategy for managing them. Like most provinces, Ontario has two bear hunting seasons, one in the spring and one in the fall. More people participate in the fall one, but the spring hunt is more controversial and emotionally charged. As trilliums burst into bloom in forests across Ontario, sows are especially vulnerable as they come out of hibernation thin, in search of food and nourishment for themselves and their young. And those cubs have a low chance of survival should they become orphaned.
It’s illegal for hunters to shoot female bears with cubs during the spring season, but the province doesn’t publish data about how often it charges people for bear hunting-related offences. Critics of the hunt say mistakes can happen without being noticed. For example, if a mother bear stashes her cubs somewhere while finding food, she might appear to be alone and fair game. Hunters argue cubs can be orphaned for many reasons — such as their mother being hit by a car — and say it’s unfair to put all the blame on them.
As concerns mounted about the ethics of the spring hunt in 1999, the Progressive Conservative government of the day cancelled it and lengthened the fall season instead. In northern Ontario, many were furious. Some hunting outfitters worried about the loss of business from tourists visiting Ontario in the spring to bag a bear. Others were concerned bear populations could grow uncontrolled, putting our species in contact with theirs even more. By and large, people felt frustrated that laws largely affecting rural northern Ontario were being written by urbanites to the south who they felt didn’t understand hunting or the culture around it.
In the years that followed, media coverage of the issue hit a fever pitch and complaints about black bears shot up in Ontario. But in a study published in 2010, a group of Ontario government scientists found the complaints weren’t the result of soaring bear numbers putting more people at risk. Instead, their data showed the number of problem bears killed and trapped stayed relatively stable. People were just complaining to the province more. While the end of the spring hunt made people less tolerant of bears, it didn’t actually make our two species bump into each other more.
Human-bear conflicts do tend to spike some years, Martyn Obbard, one of the authors of that 2010 paper, tells me over the phone. But the evidence shows it has more to do with whether bears are able to feed themselves well in the forest, or if they need to forage in dumpsters and trash cans, where they’re more likely to come into contact with us.
Obbard is retired now, but spent most of his career as the resident bear biologist at Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources. “I just loved working on bears,” he says. “I have so much respect for their intelligence and their problem-solving ability. I mean, it’s phenomenal when you look at how they can figure out how to get into what we think are bear-proof containers.” That human food is the real problem, he says. The solution isn’t to shoot more bears, it’s to crack down on the many ways people inadvertently feed them.
Still, people’s fear of black bears in the early 2000s was palpable. On some level, I understand why. One close brush with a bear was enough for me to wonder whether I was foolish not to have a gun at the cabin. Hunting offers at least an illusion of control over the bear situation, while other factors that bring more bears to our doorstep feel out of our hands — even if they aren’t, exactly.
Human-caused climate change has radically changed the terms of our social contract. If bears have easy and ample access to natural foods, humans are far less likely to interact with them. But the increasingly volatile climate — fuelled by our greenhouse gas emissions — has thrown off both bears, whose hibernation instincts are disrupted by changing temperature patterns, and the plants they eat, which are becoming less reliable because of droughts and floods.
A late spring frost, for example, can wreak havoc on berry supplies, a staple in bear diets, Obbard tells me. Female black bears usually have cubs every two years, with about half of the population reproducing one year and the other half the next. But when food supplies plummet and sows don’t have enough body weight, they won’t get pregnant — instead, most of the females will sync up and have cubs all at once the following year. “That happened in Ontario in the mid-’90s,” Obbard says. Young and reckless teenage bears are the most likely to get into conflicts with humans, so when many of them leave their mother at once, it can also lead to more encounters like mine.
While the provincial government can dictate how many hunters take bears in any given season, it can’t dictate how many cubs are born, or how hard-pressed they’ll be to find food.
Throughout the 2000s, hunting groups lobbied hard for the return of the spring hunt. “I was under tremendous political pressure to approve a spring bear hunt,” Obbard says. “They probably expected I was going to cave a lot sooner than I did, but I just dug my heels in.” The science just didn’t back it up, he says: Obbard was among a group of provincial experts who worked on a report concluding public education would be more effective. The Narwhal reached out to the Chiefs of Ontario and Anishinabek Nation for comment on the spring hunt, but neither provided statements.
In 2014, the provincial government, then under Liberal rule, brought the hunt back as a pilot project, arguing it would help keep people safe from problem bears. The current Progressive Conservative government, in its first term, reinstated it permanently in 2020, holding the first spring hunt in more than two decades the following year. In between, Obbard retired. His replacement kept studying the issue, collecting data about bear populations across the province to better inform decisions about hunting. Researchers collected fur samples to take a look at bear genetics, searching for hints at how many of them might populate specific areas.
The data showed Ontario may need to look at different mechanisms to control bear hunting. While the research isn’t public, an Ontario government scientist shared some findings with a group of North American bear experts in a virtual presentation last spring that was posted to YouTube. Black bears aren’t threatened or endangered in Ontario and experts aren’t concerned for their populations as a whole. But the number of bear hunters in the province nearly doubled in the decade leading up to 2019. In some areas of northern Ontario, particularly around Sudbury and Thunder Bay, bear populations appear to have dropped, raising concerns about whether the province might need to manage hunting differently.
Ontario doesn’t have a quota for how many bears it allows hunters to harvest. Though the province can limit hunting by visitors to Ontario, it generally gives a bear tag to any resident who applies each season.
“If we have been overharvesting then we probably can’t sustain continued growth in our resident hunter population, and probably need some sort of control on that,” the scientist said.
During the presentation, a Minnesota scientist asked why Ontario doesn’t just limit how many bears can be shot each year to ensure the hunt is sustainable.
“Social determinants of policy, I think, is the easy answer there,” the Ontario scientist said. “I don’t think that would be palatable for decision-makers.” Bear hunting contributes $50 million per year to the province’s economy, the scientist later added.
Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources didn’t answer questions about the research, or how it balances economic concerns with scientific evidence as it manages black bears.
There are other ways to handle bears. Ontario tried some of them for a while. After Obbard and his colleagues concluded public education would cut human-bear conflicts better than hunting ever could, the province established a program called Bear Wise in 2004. Bear Wise had staff on the ground in districts across the province, going into schools to teach kids bear safety and visiting homeowners to advise on best practices, like removing bird feeders in the spring, cleaning barbecues and securing garbage. They even did pilot projects, testing electric fences and other tools to keep bears away from landfills.
“We had really phenomenal levels of financial support for that program. And we did a lot of good things in the first few years,” Obbard tells me. Maybe they didn’t get everything right, but they were really trying. The team talked to social scientists, who warned it wouldn’t be so easy to engineer a shift in how our society treats bears — it could take 25 to 30 years. “Of course, we never got anywhere near that,” Obbard says. About eight years in, he recalls, the Dalton McGuinty government cut the budget of the Ministry of Natural Resources. The program shrunk. These days, Bear Wise is a web page with safety information and a hotline for the public to call to report issues. A sign made as part of the program is still posted on the highway along my route to the cabin, warning the public not to feed wildlife.
Versions of the idea exist across the continent. One of the more popular programs is Get Bear Smart, managed by a U.S. nonprofit focused on bear management in North America. Get Bear Smart’s program was first developed in Whistler, B.C., and the provincial government there encourages communities to get on board. It counts 12 that have voluntarily adopted standards to better manage living with bears. In Alberta, the Town of Banff has taken things a step further, limiting fruit-bearing trees, a major animal attractant that played a role in the deaths of many bears in the town and the surrounding Banff National Park over the years, including a notable grizzly named Bear 148. For years, the town has run a program to replace fruit-bearing plants on private property with native species that won’t draw bears, at no cost to homeowners. In 2023, it also tightened its bylaws to give the town power to order problematic trees be uprooted.
In Ontario, some communities have also sought out bear education programs. The northern city of Elliot Lake, for example, is a notable Get Bear Smart success story: it was the first in the province to implement the program, creating a set of rules in 2003 to ensure garbage was stored away from wildlife. There were more than 500 human-bear conflicts and three bear deaths the year before implementation. The year after, those numbers dropped dramatically, to 87 conflicts and zero bear fatalities. Sudbury and Timmins have also written bylaws to restrict garbage. But Ontario doesn’t encourage or support communities to stick to any particular set of wildlife management standards.
Sitting around the cabin’s dinner table on summer nights, my friends and I used to quite literally laugh at the type of precautions Bear Wise suggests. We had a deck of Get Bear Smart playing cards displaying safety tips, which we’d read aloud between rounds of crazy eights and dissolve into giggles. “Don’t linger in areas that might be attractive to bears, e.g. salmon-filled streams,” read one. “Don’t let children play in forested, heavy-use bear habitat,” read another. It certainly wasn’t something I took seriously — until summer 2023.
I’ll never know exactly what brought the black bear to my doorstep that summer. I do know I should have been far more careful. Covering the compost pile with leaves and dirt wasn’t enough — there probably shouldn’t have been one at all. The empty garbage can we kept around was another problem. It must have still had some remnants of food in it, and it wasn’t wildlife-resistant. My mom and I found the lid on a stroll through the brush behind the camp the following year, the bin nowhere in sight.
Or maybe what attracted the bear was a citronella candle I put in the outhouse in hopes it might repel mosquitoes — turns out bears love the potent, citrusy smell.
I was stupid, but I didn’t die, and it’s bears that overwhelmingly pay the price when people fail to uphold the social contract between us. When they learn to seek food from humans, Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources often steps in — and in the vast majority of those cases, the authorities shoot the bear for the sake of public safety. That happened to one black bear that wandered into a Toronto suburb in 2015 and perched in a tree in someone’s backyard. More bears are also shot and killed in self-defence, though the province doesn’t publish data about how frequently it happens.
The morning after the young black bear visited my cabin, I was set to return home. After a few uneasy hours of sleep on my saviour’s couch, I hurried to pack up, keeping one eye on the door as I tossed clothes back into my suitcase. A few days later, I heard someone in town had shot a black bear in self-defence. I’ll never know if it was the same bear, but a wave of relief swept through me, followed by a queasy guilt.
I resolved to do better, to finally make good on my end of the deal. Before my family shut down the cabin for winter, we got rid of the compost pile and did away with the citronella candles. We take garbage straight to the landfill, which has a bear-resistant dumpster. Last summer, we also stopped on our way north to grab more air horns and a few cans of bear spray.
These things have helped settle my anxious mind a bit. But without larger, systemic change in how we approach bears, the problem won’t stop — it’ll only move elsewhere, Obbard tells me. Bears return to places where they’ve found easy access to human food. They pass that knowledge on to their cubs. They also wander vast distances in search of the calories they need, which means even if one municipality locks down its garbage, it can still have nuisance bears passing through on their way to a town that isn’t so careful.
Experts flagged this as a problem in the early days of Bear Wise, Obbard says, and asked the government to write a province-wide regulation. “Politicians were reluctant to do that,” he says. “They didn’t want to be telling the municipalities what to do.”
The Ministry of Natural Resources didn’t answer questions about whether it has or would consider province-wide regulations. For now, bears emerge from their dens each spring to ever-shifting bylaws and landscapes.
Back at my cabin a year after the incident, I spotted another bear. I was moseying around town one evening, about to head home, when it strolled onto the road a block away from me and paused under a streetlight. Another young one. I hustled back to my four-wheeler and hopped on, reaching for the pocket-sized air horn tucked in my jacket. My movement was enough to startle the bear. It vanished back into the night, into the bush or toward someone else’s porch.
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