I haven’t seen or heard of any black bear encounters around our end of the Boundary Waters yet this year. There are plenty of berries starting to ripen so I don’t expect them to become a problem any time soon. We haven’t had a bear here at Voyageur for quite some time either; knock on wood.

     Here’s a bear tale from mid-Gunflint Trail on Poplar Lake I thought I would share.

Black bears get aggressive along Gunflint Trail

Dana Austin didn’t at first think much about the banging on her door last week. Her husband, Tim, had been repairing a screen door earlier in the evening, and the door had been opening and closing.

By: Sam Cook, Duluth News Tribune

Dana Austin didn’t at first think much about the banging on her door last week. Her husband, Tim, had been repairing a screen door earlier in the evening, and the door had been opening and closing.

But when the banging seemed to intensify a few minutes later, Austin, who lives on the Gunflint Trail north of Grand Marais, asked her husband what he was doing.

“He said, ‘I’m just watching TV,’ ” Austin said Monday via phone.

That’s when Austin, 70, marched down the hall to the front door to see what was going on.

“I started down the hall and heard the front door opening,” Austin said. “I thought, ‘Are we being broken into?’ ”

Well, in a way, yes.

“I heard the door creaking open,” she said. “I stepped around the corner and here was this huge — and I mean huge — black bear. He had his front feet in the door, and his head, and about the first half of his body.”

Austin and her husband had owned Rockwood Lodge on the Gunflint Trail for 20 years. They were accustomed to having critters around — bears, wolves, pine marten, foxes. So Austin wasn’t buffaloed by this bruin.

“I screamed and went running toward him,” she said. “I thought he’d back out.”

Which the bear did, but it did not run off. That’s when Austin noticed the muddy bear-paw prints all over the dining room windows. The bear eventually ran off and hasn’t returned, she said.

The Austins don’t have birdfeeders out, or any other food that might attract bears, Austin said.

She called Darin Fagerman, a Department of Natural Resources conservation officer in Grand Marais, to report the incident.

Austin said she isn’t messing around if that bear tries to come in the house again.

“I told the DNR I was going to shoot him if he comes back,” she said.

The Austins’ bear problem was one of two unusual bear incidents reported to Fagerman in the past week. The other involved a local garbage hauler who was at the U.S. Forest Service’s Kimball Lake Campground north of Grand Marais to empty the big trash bin there, Fagerman said.

“A bear came out of the woods and chased him around his truck,” Fagerman said. “(The man) slipped and fell down, and when he got up, the bear was within a couple feet, shaking its head back and forth, woofing and snapping at him.”

After one trip around the truck, the bear ran back into the woods, Fagerman said. The bear had lacerations on its neck from previous wounds of some kind, he said. The bear did not return to the campground, Fagerman said, and campers have had no other bear problems since.

Anecdotally, bear complaints have been up a bit this year, at least in some areas, said Rich Staffon, DNR area wildlife manager at Cloquet.

“I haven’t compared the numbers to last year, but I think it’s up,” he said. “And (we’ve had) a lot of kind of aggressive bears.”

One broke through car windows in the Kettle River area to get at livestock feed, and another tore siding off a shed in Esko in a failed attempt to get at food, Staffon said.