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The Bare Facts

Bear with me while I give you the bare facts. They bear consideration because this is, of course, a story about bears. (You can appreciate that this reporter gave way to the temptation to start the piece with a series of groaner puns, a pun in ever clause with no pause until the effect is grizzly.)

The story started as part of a job, my job. I was driving to an interview on Route 148 in Chester when just beyond Camp Hazen YMCA I thought I saw a very big Newfoundland, no leash, ambling across the road -- until I looked again. It was no Newfie. It was a black bear. I got a good view although there was one car in front of me. The bear crossed at its own deliberate pace and then disappeared into the bushes on the other side.

Later I discovered the bear was reported to have wandered through Camp Hazen.

Yes, it did according to Denise Learned, the Executive Director/CEO of Camp Hazen.

“The kids were in programs; not many people were around,” she said.

Campers and counselors, Learned said, are instructed in case of a bear appearance to make noise, slowly back away and head in another direction.

The bear on Route 148 was not the only bear recently sighted in Chester. John Magee and his son Grant, an Environmental Science graduate of the University of New Hampshire, saw one in their backyard on Baker Road.

“Purely by chance Grant was looking out the window noticed our visitor [the bear],” Magee explained. Grant ran upstairs for a better vantage point, and got a still shot of the bear as well as a video.

Over 20 years ago, John Magee’s former neighbors Doug and Lou McLeod, who now live in Maryland, wrote a children’s book, The Chester Bear, about a bear on their property. They never saw the bear, but observed its tracks in one of a bear’s favorite spots, around the garbage bin.

Chester children’s librarian Patty Petrus, who said she had recently had a bear in her own driveway, remembers when the McLeods came to read from their own copy of the book at the library.

“It was a lovely book, with beautiful illustrations,” she said.

The Chester Bear, nonetheless, was never published. “9/11 happened and the publishing industry just stopped,” Doug McLeod recalled. He and Lou had forgotten about the book but following stories of bears in Chester on social media, Doug McLeod said they might try to publish it now.

Dave Campbell, who lives on Turkey Hill Road in Chester, says he saw five bears last year. So far this year, he has only seen one. He got a picture of one of the bears and could see its ear tag number. Checking with the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), he found the bear was first seen in Avon and had walked its way across the state.

Human-bear encounters have become more prevalent in Connecticut. A recent well publicized one, caught on video, showed a bear ransacking a refrigerator in a West Hartford home as a resident repeatedly shouted for it to get out.

According to Jason Hawley, a wildlife expert with DEEP, there have been some 30 home entries by bears this year.

Harry Plaut, the animal control officer for Essex, Chester, Deep River and Westbrook, said that after some four years with no bear calls, he has had three this summer. He said often people do not call him but record the sighting with the DEEP. That agency’s wildlife sighting map for 2022 shows seven bear sightings in Essex, eight in Deep River and nine in Chester.

According to Hawley, the bear population in Connecticut is growing. By the mid-19th century, he said, there were no bears in the state. They had been wiped out mainly by hunting and destruction of their habitat.

But, he added, a small bear population remained in Massachusetts and that population began to expand into Connecticut, first into the Northwest corner of the state and from that nucleus, the animals spread to other areas. Now Hawley said there are some 1,250 bears in Connecticut.

The bear I saw disappeared from the road into the surrounding greenery. As I look back on it, the incident reminds me of a time-worn riddle that was a favorite of my father: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Only in this case it was a bear.

So now you know: Why did the bear cross the road? To get to the other side.