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Mammoth Is Interesting

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the January 2005 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine.)

When Steve Searles showed up at a Town Council meeting last year wearing a Mammoth Lakes Police Department uniform, it caused a stir. His long hair was draped behind him in his familiar ponytail, and his full beard was untouched by scissors or razor.

Obviously, this was no ordinary cop.

Searles, 46, is the town's celebrated "Bear Man," whose Aversive Bear program is known -- and used -- nationally and internationally. Formerly a contract employee with the town, Searles has kept a low profile for two years in the wake of the divisive Arthur incident, when Searles battled the California Department of Fish and Game over the fate of the wounded Lakes Basin bear.

Now, with his appointment last year to the MLPD as its wildlife specialist, Searles is the local law. He was asked if he was starting to come out of "Arthur hell," so to speak.

"On a personal level," he said, "this thing changed my life, the police chief's life, a lot of lives, profoundly. I lost. Arthur lost. Am I coming out of Arthur hell? You bet. I can talk about it now and not be pissed off."

When Searles talks, it's hard not to listen. His voice is deep and animated. He gestures freely; he sprinkles his vocabulary with equal parts expertise and colloquialism.

He has been in Mammoth for 20 years -- long enough to remember a time when Mammoth had practically no bears at all.

Back then, the problem was coyotes, and Searles, who grew up in Newport Beach, Orange County and Santa Ana, was the right man for the job.

"I liked to hunt and trap and track," he said. "That's how I spent all of my free time. Taking fur, selling fur, pelting animals. Nobody does it anymore, and trapping isn't even legal in California any more. I cut my teeth hunting. And when they came to have the work done for the coyotes, they knew that the biggest killing machine out there was Steve.

"When they had me do the bears, same thing. They wanted me to come in and dink 'em."

Searles, however, found a better way. He found that if you raise enough racket, maybe fire a rubber bullet or two, and pick up the cry "BAD BEAR! BAD BEAR!" it's possible to train a black bear to stay away.

The program is more complicated that that, of course, but the bottom line is that not a single bear was killed for merely being a nuisance, even back in the days when 36 bears lived in town, feeding out of 350 open dumpsters.

"The bears just responded immediately," Searles said. "They knew this stuff -- pecking orders and so on -- for a hundred years, and then they got to Mammoth and forgot.

"All I got them to do was remember. They remembered within minutes. We saw bears changing their attitudes within days or weeks. The whole town changed."

In October of 2004, Searles sat for an extended interview with Mammoth Monthly.

MM: You were brought back on board after a particularly active summer for the bears up here.

STEVE SEARLES: I would say that, yeah, they were active. But then we haven't been working them the best we could for the last couple of years. I was babysitting them all those years and then suddenly I wasn't. So they got a little bit naughtier and a little bit more bold. They had a little bit more bad behavior, yes. On the other hand, there are many bears that are very close to where we're sitting right now, and so there are very few problems. Especially when you think about the dynamics of 1.5 million visitors.

MM: Are the black bears really that harmless, at least in terms of human encounters?

SS: Most of the misinformation about black bears comes from grizzly and brown bears, which we don't have, obviously. Those bears earned their reputations, but black bears didn't. But it's some peoples' truth that if you were in a room with a black bear, somebody's going to get their butt kicked -- or worse. The truth is that thousands of people have been in rooms with bears and nobody ever gets their butt kicked. I've heard people say, "I threw the trash in the dumpster and a bear jumped out, and it's lucky that nobody got killed!” I've had cops tell me that. And I say, "Dude, you're a cop! Let's analyze this without emotion. Is that really what's going to happen?" If I had a nickel every time somebody threw a trash bag on top of a bear's head, I'd be a rich man. Not one person got slapped. Several people should have. That's bears. That's how they are.

MM: What are the demographics of our bears here?

SS: We're talking about three dozen bears. In the town of Mammoth Lakes, the true town, there are probably a dozen, plus or minus, who live here. They've been here for 10 years. They're well adjusted, they know the ins and outs, they don't get hit by cars, they know when to come and go. There is another dozen who are a little bit more stand-offish. They're on the edges of town and we can see them. They're within our view. They come in when the time is right and maybe hit us once a week for 50,000 or 100,000 calories. Then there are another dozen who are out on the motocross course, on the top of the Sherwins, on top of Mammoth Mountain, who might come in for a day or two or make a hit or two for six or seven hours of feeding, but mostly they spend their time alone, like a wild bear. So when I say three dozen, they all have different levels. I know a dozen intimately, where every house is that they like; who they have sex with, who their young is. I watch that dozen pretty closely, then monitor the rings as we go. I'm generalizing, because bears are born and some die, but as a rule of thumb, the population has stayed pretty consistent.

MM: So to get right to it, what are you supposed to do when you see a bear around here?

SS: I advise people to think of them as a stray dog. When a stray dog comes up on your front porch, every housewife in the world just runs 'em off. When a stray dog comes too close to their children, everyone runs them off. But when a bear comes into the yard, my phone rings off the hook. Up until a couple of years ago, when we had the aversive program up and running, and there would be a bear in the middle of town, say, on Mono Street, I'd have to walk the bear down the street and through the houses. Then I'd spank him and send him on his way. And along the way, in the neighborhood, I could here people catcalling from their windows and porches. You'd hear "Bad bear! Bad bear! Go home!" mimicking me, and they're all part of the cure. With the police doing it and me doing it, and with all the media coverage, it became cool to do. If every camper does that, we wouldn't have to kill any more bears at places like Whitney. As it is now, they get shot on sight. There has to be a public attitude.

MM: We know your Aversive Bear program has received a lot of attention in diverse places such as Minnesota and New Jersey. New Jersey? Really?

SS: Listen, I've been lost, twice, in New Jersey. It truly is the Garden State. And the bear-aware people there are great. They're a bunch of vegans and vegetarians and all of that, but they play on a pretty level playing field. They're all pretty well rounded and not so extreme that they can't see clearly. They're a good bunch of women out there.

MM: Is it mostly women who get involved with programs like yours?

SS: Mostly, all across the U.S., the most effective people in bear awareness and bear everything are the women. Some of the top biologists are women. But it's still a man's world when it comes down to what dies and what doesn't. It's the men who are pulling the trigger.

MM: We noticed that in the latest literature from the Visitors Bureau and Mammoth Mountain that there's not a single word about Mammoth's bears, and what to do when you see one.

SS: That's really disappointing. Everything we print, everything that comes out, should have some kind of blurb in there to keep people alert to our bears. Nationally and internationally we're seen as the synonym for coexistence with black bears -- a synonym for "live and let live" with wildlife. All the communities who want to learn how we're doing it, every one of them is kicking our butt in proper signage, trash maintenance, solid waste management, public education, stuff like that. It's a weird deal that's going on.

MM: It's hard to imagine a time when bears weren't a part of Mammoth.

SS: If you hear of a bear story today, you don't even stop to listen. Twenty years ago, it was a big deal because there weren't any bears. Back then, all of them had been transported over from Yosemite. It was a wonderful thing. They just got sick of killing bears over there. They closed the dumps and stopped the feeding and chumming program and they didn't want to kill any more so they seeded them in the drainages on the east and west sides of the Sierra. I thought it was a great idea. Today they can't do that. The bears who are relocated in Yosemite have to be relocated within the Yosemite boundaries. That's a federal deal and not a state deal. We have two Yosemite bears here now, but both of them walked here.

MM: That's quite a switch in habitat, isn't it?

SS: The diet here is rough. It's horrible. And that's why we have this phenomenon of the bears collecting around Mammoth. This is where they want to live. To walk around in the forest all day and look for something to eat is a hard go. They're 98 percent vegetarian. They don't eat people. They don't eat meat. They eat a little bit of carrion. They've got to dig for those roots and tubers and grubs. The berries aren't good over here. They're not abundant and they're tart. I've spent a lot of time in Yosemite, and it's a lot more lush. The stuff they dig up over there is better.

MM: In the spring they've got a real feeding zone up in the mountains, right?

SS: You can watch from your window as the snow line starts going up. There's a line of bears, feeding like cows on that fresh snow line. They can digest that grass for only so many days. As soon as it matures in the sun, it doesn't give them anything good at all. When the grass is sprouting, they just walk along there, feeding. That's all they eat. During those times, people will go, "Where are the bears, Steve? Where are the bears? You're doing such a great job, Steve." But if you watch up on the hill, the day that the snowcap goes off the top of the mountains, within 24 hours they'll be in your dumpsters. They've got their digestive system running again after hibernating all winter, and now they can take on more of a variety of foods. We're offering better welfare here in our community, whether we think about that or not. But from a bear's point of view, food, water and habitat is abundant. They drink out of the swimming pools, they eat out of the dumpsters, they sleep under the porches of a $500,000 condo. And when people catch 'em at it, they love them. They love to see them. They tell each other, "Get the kids, get the camera!" It's nice and warm under some of these houses here in town, and there are bear carvings out front and stuff. It's a friendly place, man. It's a Mecca, you know? You drive around town and everybody's got a little cutesy bear. It is THE place to live -- a great place to live for the bears.

MM: Especially when the town's full, huh?

SS: When they fire up The Stove restaurant in the morning, that can be smelled in Reds Meadow by bears. They can smell for miles and miles. So when we have 40,000 guests in town on a big weekend and everybody fires up and does their thing, can you imagine? There's pancakes and bacon and stuff. They can smell it for miles and miles and miles. Then there's us humans. The only thing our noses are good for is holding our sunglasses on. We have non-functioning noses compared to a bear.

MM: Your aversive program makes it tougher on them, though.

SS: Imagine that I'm the baddest bear there is. When the police keep pushing on us, and they're shutting the dumpsters and using rubber bullets and showing their dominance, we understand right away that we can't eat in front of people anymore. That's something a bear can understand. And if that's a female bear, she's going to have a little bit less to eat, so she's going to have fewer cubs or she's going to move out altogether because times are tough. Mother Nature dictates how many cubs you have. The more we push on them and artificially stimulate that pecking order through pretending we're bears, by touch, by noise -- I stamp my feet and yell, "Bad bear! Bad bear! Get outta here!" -- the more they understand. They say, "Oh man, the free ride is over." I'm oversimplifying, but that's what we're doing here in town with the core group of bears. If we shot the 12 bears, who are mostly big, older, male bears, we'd have more than 12 flood into the town. They'd be in everybody's garage. They'd be fighting in the streets. But the bears we have now know which bears own which dumpsters, what they can and can't get away with. Everything is in order. The more you shoot, the more you have to shoot. The less you shoot, the less you have to shoot.

MM: Does the presence of so much trash change their hibernation patterns? That's a common theme around here, after people see bears in the winter.

SS: I was positive that that had occurred when I first started working with the bears in Mammoth. I'd see bears in the middle of the winter walking around and I thought, "Oh ... my ... God. After a million years we've changed something as beautiful as the den time." But after learning more and working with more and more researchers, they see that it's common in the wild, too. Bears will get up for five days or a week and go right back to den. So when people see midwinter bears, part of it is me kicking them out from under buildings, and they're displaced. Part of it is natural.

MM: Do you have to kick out a lot of bears from under homes?

SS: People will leave a hole open underneath a building. They come back and find that the pipes are broken, maybe the telephone wires are all broken and that there's a den. I see about a dozen of those a year. I go in and tell the bears to get the hell out, and then you have a displaced bear for a few days. But other than that, I do not think that these bears you see midwinter are that unusual.

MM: You have names for the bears. How did that start?

SS: We took a huge amount of criticism for that very point because it humanizes the bears. People always ask me about where they live in town and they describe the local bear to me and they always ask its name. I named all the bears originally and made a kind of mug book with front and side profiles. I named them because I have crummy memory, so I called them One-Eye, or Blackie, or something. It's not like I was naming them George or Hank or Henry. It's because I'm grasping to ID them in the middle of the night. That's how it got started, and that led into a lot of media stuff and so I started to steer away from it. But now that I'm legal, I really can't see any other way. It's what they do in the national parks.

MM: Your work with other wildlife hardly gets noticed, it seems.

SS: That's how deep the concern is for that one animal. Nobody asks me about the coyotes, the cougars or the raccoons, and I know those animals even better than I do the bears.

MM: You've been active for a long time with Native Americans here, particularly when it comes to bear culture.

SS: Through their influence, that's been an enormous help to me and it continues to be a great relationship. They're very special people.

MM: You mentioned that the Mammoth locals are way into your program, or at least used to be. How do you account for that?

SS: We have a unique collection of people who are square pegs who don't fit in round holes. I think it's stereotypical that those people don't kill things they're not going to eat or use for a jacket or something like that. They know a couple of things: Bears taste bad and they make lousy jackets, so the only reason to shoot one is to have a dead bear on your wall, and they're just not into that.
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