Drought may push bears closer

Colorado’s black bears are waking up into a bad spring. The state just came through an exceptionally dry winter, with Colorado’s snowpack falling to record or near-record lows in parts of the Rockies and drought expanding across much of the state by early April. That matters because snowpack is not just water in storage. In bear country, it is also a rough proxy for how the growing season will begin, and how quickly the landscape will produce the grasses, forbs, insects, and later berries and nuts that bears rely on after they leave their dens (kunc.org) (apnews.com) (drought.gov). That does not mean drought automatically creates a bear emergency. It means bears may have to work harder for the same calories. Colorado Parks and Wildlife says more than 90 percent of a black bear’s natural diet is plants, with the rest mostly insects and scavenged carcasses. When that natural food is patchy or delayed, the easy calories around people start to look even better. Trash, bird seed, pet food, livestock feed, grills, coolers, and campsites all become shortcuts for an animal that can smell food from miles away and remembers where it found it before (cpw.state.co.us). That memory is the real problem. A bear that finds food near homes or campgrounds often comes back, and once that happens the conflict stops being abstract. Colorado Parks and Wildlife says most human-bear conflicts trace back to human food and other attractants, not to bears suddenly changing their nature. The agency’s own warning is blunt: bears that get too comfortable around people can destroy property, threaten safety, and end up killed. Drought may make the search more urgent, but unsecured food is what turns urgency into behavior (cpw.state.co.us). Colorado has already been moving in that direction because the numbers were climbing before this spring. State reporting on the 2025 season showed 5,299 bear sighting and conflict reports, about 15 percent above the recent six-year average. Trash was involved in more than 57 percent of those reports. Bird feeders showed up in another sizable share. The pattern is not mysterious. Bears are not wandering into neighborhoods because neighborhoods are interesting. They are going because neighborhoods are full of calories (denvergazette.com) (kunc.org). That is why the state is spending money on containers and fences, not on slogans. Colorado Parks and Wildlife opened its 2026 Human-Bear Conflict Reduction Community Grant Program in February with $1 million available for local projects. The program is aimed at practical work that reduces attractants or keeps bears out of high-conflict areas, including bear-resistant trash systems and other durable fixes. Applications are due May 29, and the state is clearly treating this as infrastructure, not just education (cpw.state.co.us) (governorsoffice.colorado.gov). The uncertainty is in the timing. Early spring is always lean for bears, even in good years, because the richest natural foods come later. This year, with drought deepening and 4.2 million Colorado residents living in drought areas as of data valid March 31, the margin for error is smaller. Officials are watching trail corridors, foothill neighborhoods, and mountain towns for the same reason they keep repeating the same advice: if a bear finds one open trash can, one bird feeder, or one sloppy campsite, it may remember that exact spot long after the snow is gone (drought.gov) (cpw.state.co.us).