Black Bears Looking for Fast Food Choose Minivans

The next time you're shopping for a new car, you may want to check out not only the vehicle's fuel economy and safety rating but also its bear appeal, especially if you plan to spend much time visiting national parks.

Here's a tip: forget the minivan and go for the sports car.

Year after year, minivans have been among the top choices of black bears in Yosemite National Park, according to a study reported in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Mammalogy. And like many humans, the bears seem to be choosing vehicles on the basis of fuel efficiency, which in the bears' case means deciding which types of cars and trucks offer the best chance of grabbing a quick meal. Overall, black bears have shown a strong preference for breaking into minivans over other types of vehicles, ranging from SUVs and station wagons to coupes and sedans.

For the study, which was sponsored by Yosemite National Park and the National Wildlife Research Center, researchers analyzed data on 908 car break-ins by black bears in the Yosemite Valley from 2001 to 2007. During that period, bears broke into nine different vehicle types at the following rates:

• Minivans (26.0 percent)
• Sport-utility vehicles (22.5 percent)
• Small cars (17.1 percent)
• Sedans (13.7 percent)
• Trucks (11.9 percent)
• Vans (4.2 percent),
• Sports cars (1.7 percent)
• Coupes (1.7 percent)
• Station wagons (1.4 percent)

In the wild, black bears are selective foragers. Basically, that means they go after food that will give them the most nutrition and the highest number of calories for the least effort. The article offers four hypotheses about why Yosemite's black bears are choosing to break into minivans more frequently than other vehicles:

1. Minivans smell like food--Minivans are designed for families with children and are therefore more likely to have kids as passengers, and children tend to spill food and drinks when they're riding in cars. So even when a minivan doesn't contain a big cache of food, it's more likely than most other vehicles to smell delicious to a hungry bear.
2. Minivans often contain food--Minivan passengers are more prone to take advantage of all that cargo space and to leave coolers or grocery bags filled with food in a vehicle parked overnight.
3. Minivans are easy--Structurally speaking, minivans may be easier to break into than other vehicles. Researchers noted that bears most often gained access to minivans by popping open a rear side window.
4. Repeat offenders are targeting minivans--It's not only possible but likely that just a few individual bears (as few as two and no more than five) could be responsible for all of the vehicle break-ins, and that they are displaying learned behavior in choosing minivans.

All joking aside, such research is important. Humans and wildlife are being forced to coexist in increasingly close proximity. This occurs not only in national parks that attract millions of visitors each year and are bound by law to protect wildlife, but also in thousands of areas where cities and towns are pushing into wildlife habitat and making animals more dependent on food sources connected to human settlement.

Learning more about how bears and other potentially dangerous animals forage for food among humans, and why they choose certain targets over others, will help wildlife managers do a better job of protecting both human and animal populations.

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