Along a steep, forested hillside in Gatlinburg, Janelle Musser, a biologist with the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency, is looking for black bears.
Within minutes, a woman in the distance calls out excitedly.
It’s a female bear, maybe about 200 pounds, and she has two cubs with her.
“Oh my goodness, look at them,” Musser whispers.
The mama bear eats grass while the cubs practice climbing up trees, balancing on poles and gently wrestling.
She crosses a street to find a shady spot in the woods, plops down and nurses her young.
“This is what we want people to see,” Musser said. “Nobody wants to see them get into garbage.”
Black bear encounters with people are on the rise in Tennessee, and they are not always as idyllic as this.
Bears scrounge through trash, cars and sometimes even homes for an easy source of calories. The furry creatures arguably have the best noses in the animal kingdom, 300 times better than people.
“If you come home and someone’s been making chocolate chip cookies in your house, and you think how amazing that smells, now imagine being able to smell that a mile away,” Musser said.
The trend is, in part, driven by convenience for the bears. They are opportunistic feeders. Last summer, for example, bears were content gorging on cicadas during the emergence of a 17-year brood. They mostly just sat up in trees during that time, Musser said.
But there is another, quieter factor: climate change.
How climate change affects black bears
Bears used to cover all of Tennessee.
After centuries of hunting, mining and logging, they retreated to the high terrain of the Appalachian Mountains.
Populations have since grown, and the state now has an estimated 6,000 bears. But their forest habitat is under threat, according to Matt Drury, science director of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
“A lot of these systems are on the ropes from past mismanagement,” Drury said, along with expanding land developments.
Climate change poses additional challenges.
Take extreme weather events like Hurricane Helene: Two years ago, rapid wind and record rainfall flowed down the mountains and knocked down hundreds of thousands of acres of forest. Then, non-native plants seized the opportunity to spread and knock out native species, disrupting a web of animals in the process.
A lack of rainfall is also a significant issue. In the third week of May, Great Smoky Mountains National Park was in severe drought.
Dryness in the landscape can stress bears during the spring when natural food sources are already scarce, according to Greg Grieco, a longtime park ranger who now supports orphaned cubs through the Appalachian Bear Rescue.
“Bears’ diets are pretty much limited to salad and grubs in the springtime,” Grieco said.
That type of natural vegetation scarcity may push bears to look for food around people.
“Bears kind of always get the short end of the straw when it comes to this human-bear conflict continuum,” Grieco said. “What we see is bears constantly finding new ways to adapt to their environments, even though humans really don’t do anything to help bears.”
Human-wildlife conflict is a global climate issue
Climate change affects ecosystems in many profound ways, often altering animal or human behaviors. Briana Abrahms, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, said this may then lead to more encounters.
“It really doesn’t matter where you are on the planet, all sorts of different kinds of climate drivers are creating these increased conflicts,” she said.
Similar to how drought may lead black bears into towns in the U.S., sea ice decline in the Arctic is driving polar bears away from their natural prey of seals and towards people.
In Japan, a weird event happened just last year: Prolonged overcast conditions happened as beech trees were supposed to produce nuts that Asiatic black bears rely on.
“Because of this atmospheric anomaly, that masting event never happened, and Japan saw a completely unprecedented rise in bear attacks and bear conflicts,” Abrahms said.
In turn, that creates danger for bears in the form of retaliatory killings.
Abrahms said more research is needed to identify proactive solutions.
“Human-wildlife conflict is one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss, especially for large mammals,” she said.
Paths to coexistence
In Gatlinburg, the work to create harmony between bears and people can be thorny, but the city has made progress.
The city bought bear-proof dumpsters and mandated them at businesses, short-term rentals and most private residences. Many businesses added educational signs in their parking lots, and the state just passed a law that made feeding black bears a criminal offense.
Bears sorting through trash may seem like a nuisance, but the behavior can escalate into them breaking into cars or homes.
Two weeks ago, four bears entered an Airbnb cabin in Gatlinburg and munched on trash.
“They popped the lock on the sliding door,” said Mason Eads, who was visiting from Ohio with Shana Bicknell.
They were not home when that happened. But after picking up groceries one day, bears took to their car after they stepped inside with a load.
Their Airbnb host called the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.
Musser, the state wildlife biologist, set up a bear trap and caught an adolescent later that day.
The young bear was not the target, so Musser released them back into the wild.
The bears that did enter the cabin may face euthanization, however, as they are now considered a public safety risk. The agency euthanizes about 15 to 30 bears per year, usually related to them entering homes, and often in Blount or Sevier counties where there is a high level of tourism, according to Musser.
“The best solution is prevention,” she later explained. “These bears often receive food rewards intentionally and unintentionally over time at these locations to the point where they take the next step.”
Bicknell did not complain about the encounters and rather suggested that she felt awestruck. She had visited Gatlinburg a handful of times and had never seen bears.
“Before this trip,” she said, “they almost felt like a myth.”
The ultimate goal is peaceful coexistence, and folks like Eads and Bicknell seemed eager to help — with instruction.
This story is part of our Signal Species series exploring how the region's flora and fauna are adapting to a changing climate. It was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.