When a renter moved into a Lake Tahoe cabin this winter, he expected to have his own place.
But a well-known local black bear, known as Rose, had other plans for this home, already settling into her new den in the home crawl space.
“As soon as he arrived, he started hearing babies crying under his blankets,” said Anne Bryant, executive director of the BEAR League, a Tahoe-area nonprofit dedicated to keeping bears “safe and wild.” The owner called a team to help investigate the noise he was hearing, and they quickly confirmed it was Rose and her new cubs.
The owner is now preparing to spend the whole winter with four furry companions.
“He’s very protective,” Bryant said of the recruit, who the team is not identifying to help protect the Bears’ territory. “You look like a daddy bear.”
Bryant and his team are now helping the man to get used to his new visitors, they have set up cameras to monitor the bears, so that they are safe both at home, said Bryant. Video from the group captured the cubs crying, feeding and cuddling with their mother, but most of them are sleeping.
While the nonprofit will help residents remove bears from dens — a favorite place for hibernating bears — after the cubs are born, they need to live in a warm, safe environment to survive. Bryant expects the family to stay in the crawl space until April.
“It happens every winter,” he said. Some residents do not accept this situation well. This man, however, has accepted it so much that he has named the cubs: Echo, Oakley and Storm.
Bryant estimates they are a month old now.
The cameras help the nonprofit make sure mother and cubs are safe and aren’t too close to ropes or caught in netting, both situations they’ve encountered, Bryant said. But they also help make sure bears don’t do too much damage to the home, like breaking pipes, tearing insulation or sinking heating pipes (and all those things that have happened).
“We can’t prevent all the damage,” Bryant said, “but we can prevent some of the biggest by looking at it.”
The group monitored another family of bears in another crawl space, but last winter they used to be more vigilant. The group observed five mother bears in the Tahoe area last winter. Recently, the group has also been receiving more calls about situations involving bears in Southern California, Bryant said. Although they usually only work in the Tahoe area, a few of their members went to Altadena to help a homeowner who was struggling to get a 550-pound bear out of his house.
But their message to homeowners who live near the mountains is the same regardless of ZIP Code: “If you live in bear country, you have to protect your crawl space,” Bryant said.
One of the reasons she is excited to watch over Rose and her cubs this winter is because the bear had two cubs last year – at another family’s crawl space – but both cubs died after being hit by cars.
It was surprising to find Rose with cubs again this winter, Bryant said, because black bears don’t usually breed in consecutive years. But he said it was good to see the family together.
“They’re all doing well,” Bryant said. “They’re coming out in April … and we hope you’ll keep them off the high street.”
