Bear caught snacking in Kittanning Township backyard

Debbi Reefer of Kittanning Township was busy with the Easter holiday and forgot to bring in her bird suet feeder Sunday night as she usually does.

And a bear found it.

“It’s another day in the country,” said Reefer, who has had bears on her property before.

Reefer jams a broomstick through the handles of her garbage cans to “bear proof” them. She said it does a pretty good job, noting the teeth marks on the lid.

Gary Fujak, state game warden with the Pennsylvania Game Commission, just sighed when he heard about Reefer’s late night visitor.

“That is so routine. This is what we deal with every spring,” he said.

Bears have been emerging from their winter dens looking for an easy meal like someone’s garbage or a bird feeder, according to Fujak.

“If you know you have resident bears where you live, bird feeders should be taken down by now,” he advised.

The game commission gets most nuisance bear complaints from April through June. By mid-summer, most bear issues have gone away as there’s lot of natural food in the woods. Bears are omnivores that will prey on new-born deer fawns and eat road kill, berries, grains, grasses, honey and more.

If the game commission is called about a nuisance bear, homeowners have to take down their feeders for 30 days. It’s against state game laws to feed bears.

“They are not a threat to humans, but humans are threat to them,” Fujak said. “It’s like a big nuisance raccoon except it might weight hundreds of pounds.”

Recently, he set a trap laced with donuts to capture a large male bear in East Franklin Township that has been raiding garbage cans. No luck as of Monday.

“We don’t want bears to change toward people,” Fujak said. “We don’t want them to approach humans if they see them as a food source.”