In 2023, there were 660 reports of bear incidents on the California side of Lake Tahoe. About a third of them were what the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and its counterpart on the east shore, the Nevada Department of Wildlife, call “home invasions.” That November, a bear broke into a house in Downieville, northwest of Tahoe, and killed and partially ate a woman inside. It was the first known fatal black bear attack in California history. In the spring of 2024, when the release of a pathologist’s cause-of-death findings confirmed this dark milestone, it was common for Tahoe’s black bears—in their natural state, shy and fearful of people—to enter houses when the residents were present.
Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America, is deeper in the north and shallower in the south, where sand and silt washed down from ice age glaciers on the surrounding mountains formed lacustrine ledges, beaches, marshes, wet meadows, and dry woodlands of Jeffrey and sugar pine carpeted with sagebrush and big yellow Wyethia daisies. With a year-round population of 21,000 and a much larger one of transient vacationers, the city of South Lake Tahoe is a strip development along a boulevard winding around the lake’s south shore past neighborhoods of mostly modest houses and cabins on small lots. At the western edge of town is a cluster of shopping centers. Last August, to make sense of what was going on with Tahoe bears, I arranged to meet an environmental scientist by the name of Kyle Garrett there, at a Raley’s supermarket.
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Garrett is what’s known as a conflict biologist. His title evokes images of scientists in flak vests rescuing endangered species in a war zone. But in wildlife biology, the word conflict denotes any undesirable interaction between wild animals and people. He was 30 when I met him, sturdily built, six foot three, with brown hair and an amiable and relaxed manner. His contract with California Fish and Wildlife had just ended, and he was leaving to attend graduate school, so he no longer represented the agency. I climbed into his pickup, and he drove us into a lakefront development called the Tahoe Keys, where the streets are named for vacation destinations.
The Tahoe Keys, a self-described “marina community” of more than 1,500 properties, was created by dredging the marsh where the Upper Truckee River runs into Lake Tahoe to construct a maze of canals between strips of suburban houses with backyard boat docks. Before its destruction, the Upper Truckee Marsh filtered water flowing into Lake Tahoe, helping to preserve the lake’s now-endangered cobalt-blue clarity. In the 1960s, when the wind blew across the dredge spoils, the Keys was notorious for sandstorms. More recently, it has suffered an infestation of an invasive exotic aquatic weed, Eurasian water milfoil. And bear break-ins.
The remaining wetlands and forests adjoining the development are good bear habitat, communicating to residential backyards via the canals, Garrett explained. Many of the houses are second homes, vulnerable to being torn apart at a bear’s leisure in their owners’ absence. Residents have installed security cameras, which have only afforded an opportunity to watch the destruction in real time.
Idling up Venice Drive, we passed a two-story home painted gray with white trim.
“Their security camera made a movie of a bear standing on its back legs, cleaning out the refrigerator,” observed Garrett.
He pointed to a beige house.
“A bear tried to come in through a sliding glass door. The owner was home and chased it off. He went sailing for the day. He came home, and the bear had broken into the slider and was inside sitting on the couch.”
At a house on Catalina Drive, Garrett said, “A couple were out in front doing yard work with their garage door open and heard a loud noise inside the garage. So they went in there, and there was a bear taking food out of their freezer. They chased it off, wrapped up their yard work, closed up the garage for the day, and went inside.
“Later that afternoon, they were sitting in their house with the screen door open, sitting there reading. A bear came in through the screen door, came to their refrigerator-freezer, and took a bunch of food. They chased it out. I went there and collected DNA. When it was analyzed, it showed there were actually two different bears. Two bears in one day. Yep.”
Farther up Catalina Drive, Garrett pointed to a narrow gap between two houses. A resident had been carrying loads of gear from his garage at the front down this alley to his boat, tied to a dock at the back. “A neighbor called him and said, ‘Hey, there’s a bear in your garage.’ So he comes back up in between the houses, banging on the wall to scare the bear out,” said Garrett.
The man entered his garage. The bear started to move outside, toward the alley.
“It pokes its head around the corner down towards the water, and instead of running towards all this vast freedom, it decides to charge the man,” Garrett told me.
Just inside the garage was a collection of wine bottles for recycling.
“He grabbed one and hit the bear in the head with it,” said Garrett. “The bear spun around and left. About 35 minutes later, the bear came back and wouldn’t leave again until the man hit it on the head with a broom. He had to chase it off multiple times for the rest of the day.”
These were just a handful of the homes Garrett showed me. And the problem was not limited to the Keys. Toogee Sielsch, an avid naturalist and longtime South Lake Tahoe resident, told me that when he first lived there in the early 1980s, bears were hardly ever seen. Now close-range skirmishes like the one in the boater’s garage are taking place all the time.
A region of nasal mucous membranes in a bear’s head has a hundred times the number of sensory receptors of a human’s. The animal’s sense of smell is a veritable X-ray vision through doors, past window shades, and into locked cars. Tahoe garages interest bears because, in addition to freezers full of food and sacks of dog chow, they often contain bags of garbage waiting to be carried to the curb on trash-collection day.
Bears also have phenomenal memories for places they previously acquired food. Garrett pointed to several garage doors that had been broken and subsequently repaired or replaced. Emerging from the neighboring swamps and canals, bears had left muddy paw prints on the doors as they evaluated the repairs. At one garage, a bear had previously shattered one of four translucent panels to gain access to a latch (yes, they are that clever). The panel had been replaced with a new one of a slightly different color. Now there were muddy footprints on the replacement, but not on any of the others.
A better alternative to storing garbage in garages is the thick steel receptacles known as bear boxes, bolted down in the front yard where refuse collectors can empty them. Remarkably, until 2022, they were forbidden by the Tahoe Keys Property Owners Association. An association newsletter explained that Keys lots were small and the houses close together, and bear boxes took up too much space. If everyone installed them, residents would feel “hemmed in by a ‘wall-of-steel.’ ”
Beyond South Lake Tahoe, where the garbage service has just given residents new plastic bins with plastic latches (bears have jumped on some until they failed), a balkanization of authority afflicts the area’s waste disposal, with two states, four counties, and various cities, improvement districts, and garbage services contributing to its complexity. In general, bear boxes, which can cost more than $2,000 including installation, are mandated for new construction, remodels, and vacation rentals but not for thousands of existing homes. Businesses are required to have bear-resistant dumpsters, but employees sometimes leave them unlatched. Code enforcement is spotty to nonexistent.
On the California side, the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife is charged with responding to conflicts with wild animals. But as late as January 2025, the Tahoe Keys Property Owners Association’s website didn’t mention the agency, instead instructing residents with bear problems to call an animal rights nonprofit, the BEAR (for Bear Education Aversion Response) League. The league dispatches volunteers to chase off bears and advise residents on making their homes less attractive to them, but is opposed to trapping or killing even the most notorious animals. As I learned about the decades-long tussles between wildlife biologists and people whose houses had been upended on one side and BEAR League activists and supporters of their cause on the other, I came to understand that behind the struggle between bears and people in Lake Tahoe lay a deeper struggle between people and other people, over bears.
In the 19th century, unregulated shooting and fishing wiped out populations of wild animals, rendering some, like the California grizzly, extinct. Around the turn of the century, conservationists began setting up commissions and bureaus to restore game populations, funding them with fees from hunting and fishing licenses. These agencies have long since broadened their missions to protect nongame wildlife, but having originated to serve hunters and fishers, both California’s and Nevada’s wildlife departments, to this day, refer to the legal killing of animals as a “harvest.”
Alongside this sort of hook-and-bullet conservation emerged a related, but different, initiative that concerned itself with the well-being of animals. Coming of age with the 1975 publication of philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, the animal rights movement condemned hunting and promoted vegetarianism, but focused more on the suffering of individual creatures than on ecological management of populations. Scientific conservation and animal rights activism have frequently been at odds, as when animal lovers set out food for feral house cats that prey on wild birds.
At Lake Tahoe, in 1998, a charismatic and outspoken animal rights activist on the west shore, Ann Bryant, organized a group of fellow animal lovers to resist the killing of “problem bears.” When I visited Bryant in late 2024, she was 73. She said she’d been a vegetarian for most of her life. She has well-tended blond hair, with bangs. She wears sunglasses indoors and out and has been famous for decades for her bear advocacy. In 2011, Animal Planet aired a reality TV show about Bryant and her followers, Blonde vs. Bear. In a trailer, she is seen chasing off bears to keep them from harm at the hands of people and screaming at a man for endangering a bear. The show was canceled, but Bryant’s notoriety raised the profile of her mission. To Bryant, saving bears means keeping them out of the hands of state wildlife agencies.
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“According to the state department of wildlife, the bears, especially, are here for men and women to hunt. And it’s the trophy hunt,” said Bryant. “That, in their opinion, is the only reason they’re here. I don’t believe that.”
“Is killing an animal unnecessarily equivalent to murder?” I asked her.
“In my opinion, yes, it is,” she replied. “I guess I can draw the limit on mosquitoes and maybe flies, but I don’t believe we have the right to do that.”
While the BEAR League does provide useful public education on how to live with bears, its default position is that all conflicts are the fault of the humans involved. Euthanasia is out of the question even as bears grow bolder.
With the growth of social media, the BEAR League’s Facebook page; another aimed at Nevada’s Department of Wildlife, called NDoW Watch: Keeping Them Transparent; and a third, Lake Tahoe Wall of Shame, whipped up indignation toward wildlife agencies as well as homeowners and vacation renters who demonstrated a lack of bear savvy. BEAR League sympathizers posted photos and information on where wildlife agencies set live traps and the homeowners who requested them. The league would then try to pressure homeowners to have the traps removed and would stake out the traps to spook bears from entering them.
A high school science teacher and professional mountain bike racer whose car was damaged by a bear requested that the bear be trapped and removed. She was approached and scolded by a BEAR League volunteer. The activist and their confederates called the victim’s school principal and athletic sponsors to muddy her reputation. The teacher reported receiving death threats from bear sympathizers. A former Nevada state senator applied for a court protective order against Bryant and other activists for stalking and harassing him after he requested the removal of a bear that had broken into his vacation home. A Nevada Department of Wildlife conflict biologist towing a bear trap was followed and tailgated by an activist in a road rage incident. A Nevada court ordered the animal rights advocate to stay away from the biologist. Lawsuits were filed and settled. Meanwhile, the tone of the Facebook pages was menacing.
“Hurt my bears and I’ll make you hurt way worse,” posted one bear defender.
“Somebody needs to go and jack slap that b---- for getting that bear killed,” another posted.
“Time for an effective drive-by,” threatened a third.
Bryant rejects the idea that a bear’s behavior can be irreparably altered by repeated interactions with people and their food. “Bears don’t become aggressive like the department of wildlife will tell you,” she said. “They say once a bear gets used to human food, like garbage or people throwing food out in their backyard, they become aggressive. That’s not true. They just become even more tame and less aggressive.”
There is no disagreement among the factions over whether the trouble originates with bears’ access to humans’ food. But bear biologists argue that once this process produces a bear that confronts people inside their own homes, it is no longer a natural bear, doing what bears do. Garrett points to the concept of a behavioral ladder, the rungs of which mark the downward spiral from a natural bear to one that grows aggressive toward human beings.
Human-caused change in bear behavior takes two forms: food conditioning and habituation. Food conditioning is the cycle of reward and behavior change associated with a bear’s acquisition of food and garbage. Habituation is the process by which, even without food rewards, a wild animal can become increasingly comfortable closing the distance between itself and humans as well as their habitations, the classic example being a bear taking a midday nap a few feet from a home on someone’s lawn. In either case, confined spaces increase the danger. Feeling afraid for itself or its cub, a bear may charge and swat at a human with its paws, which have big, scimitar-like claws. And feeling threatened, armed residents have shot bears.
Garrett began working on bear-human conflicts about nine years ago. Before coming to California in April 2023, he worked, mostly with grizzlies, in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. In Idaho, according to his résumé, he livetrapped 35 grizzlies. However, he has never seen anything like the situation in Tahoe.
“In your entire career, prior to coming to Tahoe, how many home invasions have you seen?” I asked him.
“One,” he said. “A grizzly. It broke into a garage. There was an elk hanging inside.”
“You can’t manage bears in the [Lake Tahoe] Basin like you can in other places because of the BEAR League,” said Peter Tira, information officer for California Fish and Wildlife. In Tahoe, both state wildlife agencies require that DNA samples be taken from every bear they capture and from the scene of its misdeeds. Tahoe is the only place in either state where this is true. The technology is so sensitive that it can identify a bear from one of those muddy footprints on a garage door, or in your devastated kitchen. Detailed dossiers are being created on individual bears. In October 2024, as I was working on this story, California Fish and Wildlife killed a bear with a record of 14 home invasions.
“There are Tahoe bears with 30,” Garrett told me. Experienced home invaders become difficult to recapture, he explained, because, with a smorgasbord of houses to exploit, they have little reason to enter a baited trap. “There are bears I was chasing when I first got here, and they’re still chasing them as I leave,” said Garrett, shaking his head.
A common misconception is that conflict bears—those that have entered homes and garages or approached, charged, or injured humans—can be relocated to some wild place where they will return to their native foods. In reality, relocation has, for the most part, been a dismal failure. Bears are amazing navigators who tend to return to the places they came from—even when anesthetized during transport. Or, they find human foods and get into conflicts with people in a new place. Or, drifting around a new landscape, they are hit by a car or shot by a hunter. Both California and Nevada maintain an option of sending cubs to rehabilitation centers, from which they are sometimes successfully returned to the wild, but this doesn’t apply to full-grown conflict bears. Black bears are so common that there isn’t much demand for them in zoos. Nationwide, less than 1 percent of conflict bears get a new life in an enclosure, estimates Pat Craig, founder of four animal sanctuaries in Colorado and Texas. In 2023, Craig accepted Hank the Tank, a massively overfed bear with a history of 21 home invasions whose life Bryant was trying to save. Both Garrett and Craig say the bear will never go back to the wild. And Hank was one of the lucky ones. Whether owing to an unhealthy diet, being hit by a car, or being legally killed for destructive behavior or by a hunter, life for civilized bears is nasty, brutish, and short.
Wildlife managers have long been interested in using hazing and aversive conditioning to restore habituated and food-conditioned bears’ fear of humans. The Nevada Department of Wildlife partners Karelian bear dogs—a breed from Finland that has been used in Montana—with its conflict biologists. California uses paintball guns as well as rubber bullets and beanbag projectiles designed for police use and has implemented an experimental program called Trap-Tag-Haze. Hazing can work on young bears who have not experienced repeated success in acquiring human food and garbage, but not so much with savvy adult bears. The senior bear biologist in the Lake Tahoe Basin is the Nevada Department of Wildlife’s Carl Lackey. In 2024, he had been working with bears for 28 years, and he has published peer-reviewed research on them. It was Lackey who brought Karelian bear dogs to Nevada, where they are trained to chase and nip at bears as they are released, after being trapped.
“Does hazing work on adult bears that have received repeated food rewards?” I asked Lackey.
“Probably not,” he replied. His research and that of others reflect this.
Simply put, food conditioning in its later stages is irreversible. And creating new generations of conflict bears, then saving their lives when they become a public safety risk may well be why the situation in Tahoe and its surroundings has become so bad.
In the small town of Downieville, California, in Sierra County, 71-year-old Patrice “Patty” Miller lived alone in a rented yellow turn-of-the-century cottage a block from the county courthouse. She had been setting out cat food on her front porch, and there was garbage in and outside the house. “She was not the best housekeeper,” said Mike Fisher, the sheriff-coroner of Sierra County, when I spoke with him last November. A bear or bears had made repeated attempts to enter her home. “She had bars installed on her kitchen window. Those bars were not put there because it’s a high-crime area. They were put in specifically to keep bears out,” Fisher said. At one point, she punched a bear that was trying to climb inside. A game warden called her after a neighbor hinted at the conditions at her home. They talked about cleaning up and having the bear removed. But Miller didn’t want bears harmed.
In autumn, bears begin a feeding frenzy to build fat reserves before entering their winter dens. On November 8, 2023, a friend reported that Miller hadn’t been seen for a few days. A sheriff’s deputy went to the house, peered through the half-glass front door, saw a trail of blood smeared across the living room floor, drew his gun, and broke in the door. Inside, he found piles of bear scat in the living room and Miller’s body in the kitchen. She had been partially eaten. The bars had been torn off the kitchen window. In an investigation by Fisher’s staff and a California Fish and Wildlife warden, DNA samples were collected from Miller’s injuries and from soup cans bitten through by the bear. When processed, the samples indicated the culprit was a male. Initially, it was believed that Miller might have died of other causes before the bear broke in and fed on her. After some wrangling between Fisher and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, a trap—a cage on trailer wheels with a door activated by a baited trigger—was parked next to Miller’s cottage.
At around the same time as Miller’s death, in a Tahoe Keys apartment, a woman was mopping her floor as her boyfriend vacuumed a carpet. He opened the front door to allow the floor to dry, and the two of them went into a bedroom. Returning minutes later, they found a cub in the kitchen and a female bear between them and the front door. In the melee that followed, the adult bear—which had a biologist’s tag in one of its ears—attacked the woman, inflicting lacerations that would require sutures to her face, chest, and back. Garrett recalled that the same bear had been DNA-matched to another attack a couple of years before, but had not been captured.
Before dawn on November 17, 2023, Garrett and four other California Fish and Wildlife employees assembled to hunt down and capture the two bears in the Tahoe Keys attack. They were quickly located. Having been responsible for two attacks, the sow was killed with a lethal dose of drugs and her body transported to a meat freezer for a later necropsy. The cub was judged to be young enough to be given a chance at a natural life. Garrett drove it up a four-wheel-drive road to a remote release site where it might stay away from people.
In Downieville, that same morning, a bear was found in the trap outside Miller’s house. A strike by state environmental scientists over contract negotiations had left those, like Garrett, who stayed at their posts even more shorthanded than usual. A biologist who had never tranquilized a bear was sent to Downieville, where, unable to physically examine it, she visually identified the animal inside the trap as a female, not a male like the culprit, as confirmed by the DNA from the death scene. Based on that, California Fish and Wildlife ordered Fisher to release it.
In the days since Miller’s death, neighbors had reported a bear hanging around her house, and it had broken in again after her body was removed. Fisher had a feeling that this trapped bear was the one that had killed Miller and was unconvinced that it was a female. He padlocked the trap with the bear in it and threatened to alert the media if the state released it without sending a qualified biologist to determine its sex. Back in cell range after releasing the Tahoe Keys cub, Garrett was dispatched to drive two and a half hours to Downieville. It would be a 19-hour day for him.
It was around 9 p.m. by the time Garrett got out of his truck at the yellow cottage. Fisher had screwed a sheet of plywood over the broken front door. It was cold; Garrett’s breath made clouds in the beam of his headlamp. He put on a down jacket. Fisher and a federal trapper who had captured the bear were there. Having stood around all day negotiating with the state, the sheriff was not happy.
In the trap, the bear was quiet. Garrett loaded a hypodermic on the end of a metal rod with an anesthetic called Telazol and approached the trap. As he plunged the needle into the bear through an opening, the bear sat up like a dog, and Garrett could see it was a male. He waited for the drug to take effect, removed the bear from the trap, confirmed its sex, and took DNA samples that later matched those taken from the victim’s body. California Fish and Wildlife ordered the bear to be killed. The trapper shot it.
Bear cubs learn from their mothers what to eat and how to get it—a process referred to by biologists as social learning. Brought up watching their mothers break into cars or rummage around in dumpsters, cubs born of conflict females are more likely to become conflict bears themselves. When grown, they in turn pass that behavior on to their cubs, and so on. It’s something like a behavioral virus.
Such was the case with the Tahoe Keys cub Garrett released after its mother was euthanized. It denned up for the winter of 2023 and in the spring began getting into trouble at the Palisades Tahoe ski resort. It was relocated south of Lake Tahoe, where it again got into trouble and was euthanized.
Through DNA testing, authorities have identified more than 320 bears in the Lake Tahoe Basin. Biologists estimate there are more than 400 total. Of those, in a tally of figures from the end of 2023, 16 food-conditioned bears were responsible for more than half of all reported bear-human conflicts on the California side. In the deeply divided realm of Tahoe bear management, what does seem to be helping—if only at individual addresses that have them—is electric doormats, called “unwelcome mats”; window wires; and other deterrents that give bears a nonlethal shock when they approach an opening. The BEAR League lends them out for free to homeowners.
As I reported this story, an uneasy ceasefire prevailed between the animal rights activists and the two state agencies. Facebook pages had been cleansed of threatening posts. Agency spokespeople were guarded while speaking with me. Nevada’s Carl Lackey, who has a national reputation in bear biology, was initially eager to talk and then, apparently on the advice of his agency, refused to. In a conversation with me, Bryant referred to Lackey as “one of [the Nevada Department of Wildlife’s] so-called bear biologists.” The league nursed a special hatred for Lackey, whom it accused of coming up with population estimates showing enough bears in Nevada to justify the state’s bear hunt. Bryant had long accused Lackey of relocating conflict bears from Tahoe to places where they could be hunted. Lackey had sued the league for defamation of character, lost under the legal theory that the posts about him on Facebook were free speech, and had to pay more than $150,000 in court costs. During the worst of his social media demonization, a photo of one of his children was posted in an online doxing, said Lackey.
Heather Reich, the Nevada conflict biologist who was granted a judge’s protective order after being tailed by an aggressively driving BEAR League activist, quit state employment and went into business with her husband, Derek, selling and installing electric doormats and other nonlethal deterrents. She told me she is happy not to have to kill bears anymore.•
Jordan Fisher Smith spent 21 years as a park and wilderness ranger in California, Wyoming, Idaho, and Alaska. He is the author of the memoir Nature Noir: A Park Ranger’s Patrol in the Sierra and Engineering Eden: A Violent Death, a Federal Trial, and the Struggle to Restore Nature in Our National Parks, which won a California Book Award and was long-listed for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. He lives in the northern Sierra Nevada.
