A black bear in a mountain-town alley at 2 a.m. looks like a bear problem. It is not. It is the last page of a story that started in late spring, on a frost-burned slope, when the chokecherries didn’t set.
Why are bears coming into towns? Because the forest ran out of calories first. In a dry year — low snowpack, late frost, drought, fire — the berries, acorns, and grasses that carry a black bear through summer and into hibernation fail across whole regions at once. The bear does what any animal with a two-year food memory does: it walks downhill to the nearest pantry that is still full. That pantry is your town.
what a food year is
A food year is the annual calorie budget a landscape produces for the animals that live on it. For a Colorado black bear the budget has three lines: green grass and forbs in spring; serviceberry, chokecherry, and hawthorn in summer; Gambel oak acorns in fall. Each line depends on the weather that came before it. Snowpack sets soil moisture. A late frost kills the blossom. Drought cures the grass and shrivels whatever fruit did set. Fire takes whole hillsides off the ledger for years.
When those lines fail together, the year fails. Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers described exactly that in 2026: chokecherries scarce, serviceberries and hawthorn thin, grasses dried out, and the Gambel oak — the late-season acorn crop bears bank on — barely producing. The failure was not uniform — Aspen's serviceberry crop held up better than the rest of the Roaring Fork Valley — but the line that decides the year is the last one. When the fall acorn crop is sparse, a decent June does not carry a bear into November. That is not a bear behaving badly. That is a supplier missing the delivery that mattered.
Then the calendar makes it worse. From late summer into fall, bears enter hyperphagia — a stretch when they spend up to 20 hours a day awake and searching for food, and try to take in around 20,000 calories a day to build the fat that gets them through winter. A bear in hyperphagia in a failed food year is not choosing between the forest and the alley. There is one pantry left with food in it, and it has a dumpster behind it.
the alley is the receipt
Read the 2026 numbers as a receipt, not a scoreboard. They are preliminary, reported by Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) through 31 August 2026, and they will move.
In the agency’s northwest region — Routt, Grand, Summit, Eagle, Pitkin, Mesa, and their neighbors — reports were up roughly 173% on the first eight months of 2025. By mid-August, Aspen’s wildlife program had logged 311 incidents of bears in trash, recycling, and compost, against 127 the year before and 74 the year before that. The city added a seventh day of alley patrols, and its wildlife coordinator, Lara Xaiz, was frank that the extra patrol day explains part of the rise but nothing like a tripling in three years.
Each of those figures is a line on the same invoice. A trash call is a failed berry crop showing up as staff hours. A relocation is a failed acorn crop showing up as a truck, a drug dose, and a 40-mile drive — sometimes followed, says CPW northwest regional manager Travis Black, by the same bear back in the same location within days, because the habitat it was moved to is just as empty. A euthanasia is the food year’s final line, paid by the animal and by an officer who did not join the agency to do that.
None of this is a criticism of the people doing the work. Hazing, relocation, and euthanasia are what a wildlife agency can do in September with the food year already lost. The receipt is real. The question this series asks is why we keep paying it at the register instead of at the source.
a fed bear is a dead bear — true, and not enough
The slogan is correct. A bear that learns a dumpster pays out will return to it, escalate from bins to bird feeders to garages to kitchens, and eventually be killed for it. Securing trash, pulling feeders, locking cars, and cleaning grills genuinely save bears. CPW, BearWise, and the volunteer coalitions in the Roaring Fork Valley, Durango, and Steamboat are right to push it, and towns that mandate wildlife-resistant cans are right to mandate them.
But look at what the slogan governs. It governs the town pantry. It says nothing about the wild one. You can run a perfect attractant program — every latch closed, every feeder down — and the bear is still hungry, still in hyperphagia, still walking a drainage into town because the hillside above it produced nothing. Alley hygiene lowers the payout of the raid. It does not restore the reason the raid happened.
A trash ordinance is not a berry crop. The ordinance is necessary. It is also a response to a supply failure it cannot fix.
three pantries, three timings
The contrast that matters is not bear versus human. It is when money enters the food year.
| pantry | wild pantry | town pantry | funded food year |
|---|---|---|---|
| what it is | Chokecherry, serviceberry, acorn, grass, and water on the landscape | Trash, feeders, grills, compost, orchards, kitchens | Forage, water, and habitat condition on a named place, kept producing |
| who pays | Habitat programs and land trusts, in episodic grant cycles — then nobody, when the crop fails | Residents, HOAs, towns, and wildlife agencies — after the raid | Beneficiaries of the place — towns, landowners, stewards, insurers — before the dry year |
| when money arrives | Never, in most budgets | September, as cans, patrols, tickets, relocations, euthanasia | Now, as stewardship of what is presently growing |
| what it buys | The animal’s actual diet | A lower payout per raid | Fewer raids, because there is less reason to leave the forest |
| timing | Ignored | After the loss | From now, on present condition |
Nothing in that table makes the town pantry optional. The point is not that nobody funds habitat — Great Outdoors Colorado, CPW habitat programs, federal forest-health dollars, and land trusts all do. It is that habitat money arrives as episodic project grants while the alley money arrives every September, on schedule. Only one of the three columns pays for condition continuously, on a named place, before the dry year.
fund the forage
This is where the series turns. Every actor in the bear story already spends money on the food year — they just spend it on the last line of the receipt. A town pays coordinators and can programs. A homeowner pays for a new freezer and a deductible. A wildlife agency pays in staff hours and in the cost, of every kind, of killing an animal it would rather not. Those are real budgets. They are pointed at the alley.
Funding the food year means pointing some of that budget uphill, on purpose, before the dry year: at the oak and shrub stands on the bench above town, at the riparian strip and the springs that hold water through August, at the forage a landowner or land trust can keep producing on a named piece of ground. Not supplemental feeding — CPW will not drop food for bears and says so plainly, because concentrating solitary, territorial animals at a feed pile causes fights, endangers cubs, and teaches bears that people mean meals. Nobody here is proposing berries from helicopters. The proposal is that the land that grows berries be treated as an asset someone is paid to keep in condition.
Ensurance is the mechanism for that. It funds a natural asset for what it is presently producing — condition priced, routed to a named place — instead of paying after the loss. In the protocol’s own terms, a coin funds that kind of protection broadly and a certificate funds one named place directly; that is the whole gloss, and you do not need it to follow the rest. Timing is the argument — the same one made in nature finance has a timing problem — and the soil-and-water half of it lives in drought-proofing starts in the soil, not the reservoir.
Two honest notes. First, our stage: the live door here is an agent like habitat.ensurance, and the volumes are small. The instrument exists; the scale is being built, and fund the food year says how. Second, price is a bridge. Nothing in this series will tell you what a bear is worth in dollars, because a bear is not a claim or a grant. The number attaches to the condition of the land, so the people who already pay for its failure can pay for its function instead.
movement is a different invoice
If your bear question is about a highway, this is the wrong post. A bear on a road is a severed route; a bear in a dumpster is a failed pantry. Both are natural capital failures, and they come with different invoices, different fixes, and different funders. The route side — corridors, crossings, the carcass on the shoulder — is covered in wildlife corridors: the infrastructure of survival. This series stays on the food.
frequently asked questions
why are bears coming into towns?
Because their natural food failed. In drought years with low snowpack, late frost, or fire, berry, acorn, and grass crops collapse across whole regions, and bears in hyperphagia follow drainages into towns where trash, feeders, grills, and fruit trees offer concentrated calories. Bears can remember a food source for up to two years, so one successful raid raises the odds of the next.
what is a food year for wildlife?
A food year is the calorie budget a landscape produces for its wildlife in a given year — for black bears, spring grasses, summer berries, and fall acorns, each set by the weather before it. A good food year keeps animals in the forest. A failed one moves them to wherever food still is, which in a mountain valley is usually a town.
does drought cause bear conflicts?
Yes. Drought is a primary driver of human-bear conflict because it removes the wild food supply that keeps bears out of neighborhoods. Colorado’s 2026 season — critically low snowpack, widespread drought, a late frost, and a heavy fire year — coincided with more bear reports by 31 August than in all of 2025, with relocations (98, against 33) and euthanasias (294, against 83) both roughly triple the same eight months a year earlier, according to preliminary CPW figures. Colorado holds an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 black bears, the vast majority on the Western Slope. Conflict does not start in the alley. It starts in the berry crop.
read next
Two spokes go deeper before the series turns toward the bill and the fix.
- human-wildlife conflict is a food failure with a police file — what each incident report is actually recording
- the same raid, different species — bears in Aspen, elephants in maize, baboons at the bins; one dry pantry
- explore the places and the agents funding them →
the series
This is part of the food year — drought empties the wild pantry; the alley is the receipt.