{"id":740409,"date":"2026-06-16T15:31:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T15:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/740409\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T15:31:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T15:31:10","slug":"why-more-bears-are-entering-urban-areas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/740409\/","title":{"rendered":"Why more bears are entering urban areas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bear sightings and attacks continue across Japan as the animals have begun to encroach further into urban areas, terrifying residents and causing disruptions.<\/p>\n

Following last year\u2019s unprecedented number of reported\u00a0bear sightings<\/a> \u2014 and a record death toll of 13 \u2014 bears have remained active across the country this year, with deadly consequences. As of the beginning of June, there have already been five deaths caused by bears this year, according to the Environment Ministry.<\/p>\n

Beyond the fatalities, what has been especially notable this year is the bears\u2019 willingness to increasingly roam into urban areas.<\/p>\n

Last week, a bear was captured<\/a> in the central city of Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture after it made its way through a university, shopping arcades and schools over three days, scaring residents and forcing schools to cancel classes.<\/p>\n

A week earlier, four people were injured in a residential area in the city of Fukushima after an \u201cextremely intelligent\u201d bear<\/a> found its way into a factory. It reportedly turned on faucets to get water and escaped traps set up to capture it.<\/p>\n

Koji Yamazaki, head of the Ibaraki Nature Museum and an expert on bear activities, says the increased presence of bears in urban areas is most likely due to either the animals living closer to human residential areas in the first place or their becoming increasingly used to people.<\/p>\n

\u201cA significant number (of bears) were culled last year, so I don\u2019t think the number of bears have gone up dramatically,\u201d Yamazaki says. \u201cRather, it\u2019s highly likely that more bears have become too accustomed to being around human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Known for their intelligence, bears are quick to adapt to different environments. They have quickly learned, for example, where they can go within cities to obtain food, and as they continue to have success in such places without encountering deterrents, some bears now understand they can safely enter human-populated areas \u2014 something they knew to avoid in the past when humans posed a bigger threat to them. Fewer hunters and people living near bear habitats who could deter them from getting too close have exacerbated the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cBears are learning to lose their fear of people and their sense that humans are something to avoid, and as a result, they do not mind entering residential areas,\u201d says Toshio Tsubota, a professor of wildlife biology and medicine at Hokkaido University.<\/p>\n

As for the increased activity during this season, Yamazaki says it is not so much about a lack of nuts, which motivated the bears last fall to move beyond their normal territories.<\/p>\n

\u201cJune is mating season for bears, and large males tend to roam across wide areas in search of females \u2014 that was probably the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bear sightings and attacks continue across Japan as the animals have begun to encroach further into urban areas,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[1313,64,63,4632,65705,275576,357242,128,338],"class_list":["post-740409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animals","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bears","tag-environment-ministry","tag-hokkaido-university","tag-ibaraki-nature-museum","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}