Bear traffic is at its peak in June and July as more sightings and nuisance reports are made.<\/p>\n
According to game wardens, now is an opportunity to research the population, and it all starts with trapping a bear.<\/p>\n
In Upper Mount Bethel Township, a new bear is on researchers’ radars.<\/p>\n
“Every year we try to capture bears for research. Essentially, what we’re doing is we’re trying to make sure the population is stable,” said Officer David Furmato with the Pennsylvania Game Commission.<\/p>\n
A bear is getting a complete work up. After it’s trapped and tranquilized, they check its age by pulling a milk tooth, check its weight and gender, and give the bear two tags.<\/p>\n
“If it were to get hit by a car on the road, harvested by a hunter, or re-trapped again by another officer, we can find out if it has those tags, what that last encounter was, or however many encounters it may have had,” said Furmato.<\/p>\n
This bear is between 300 and 350 pounds.<\/p>\n
“It helps people understand, hey, like they’re not terrifying. You know, they’re not scary. Black bears by nature are more likely to run away from you than to run at you,” said Furmato.<\/p>\n
Game wardens say on the outskirts of the Poconos, bears are looking for territory here in the Lehigh Valley. They say the key is learning to live with them.<\/p>\n
“It’s learning to live with bears and taking away food sources for them. That’s really all they care about,” said Officer Nickolas Visser with the Pennsylvania Game Commission.<\/p>\n
That means no bird feeders and making sure your trash can is bear-proof. While this bear heads back to the woods, the game wardens hope you will educate yourself on bears habitat and biology and how to prevent human conflict.<\/p>\n
“We’re all about education. We’re all about helping to show everybody that, hey, like, wildlife is going to be here, bears are going to be here,” said Furmato.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bear traffic is at its peak in June and July as more sightings and nuisance reports are made.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":756136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[61345,71410,79,201],"class_list":["post-756135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-northampton-county","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=756135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/756136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=756135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=756135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=756135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}