CONNECTICUT Black bears can be found throughout the state, and their population is on the rise, according to the latest data released by the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

"That means there is going to be more encounters between bears and humans, and those encounters can take many forms," said DEEP wildlife biologist Paul Rego.

Those can range from spying one from a distance during a nature walk to hitting one on a highway through having one break into your home looking for breakfast.

Residents interested in minimizing the number of those last kinds of encounters would do well to stow their bird feeders, according to Rego. Not only do they attract bears, but reward them for coming close to your home. That same guidance applies to trash cans that aren't tightly covered.

It's not that the bears have become hungrier or more desperate, it's just that they have become more habituated to man-made structures and human behavior.

"Almost all of a bear's life revolves around food," Rego said. "So when they break into a home it means they have overcome any fear of humans."

On those infrequent but memorable occasions when you encounter a bear in your kitchen, Rego says the important thing to remember is to not corner it.

"Often once a bear detects a human inside the home, it will try to leave, most often through the same route that it entered." So, make sure you're not in the way.

It's less rare to find a bear along your hiking trail. Now that hiking season is in full throttle, Rego recommends you start making some noise, and maybe bring a noisy group along for the romp.

"The most dangerous thing you can do involving bears is to surprise one," the biologist said.

The second, related, rule is to keep your dog on a leash. Bears "generally have no interest in pursuing humans as meals," but they'll happily break a sweat for your off-leash dog. When your canine friend inevitably leads the bear back to you, everybody gets caught off-guard by the surprise, and nobody has a good day.

If you're camping, it's important to keep a clean campsite, and make sure the food is not available to bears. Some campgrounds provide a big metal "bear box," Rego said. Otherwise, he recommends storing the burger patties and s'mores fixings in your car.

Connecticut is currently at the height of bear activity. Late May to early July is their breeding season, and the time of year that young bears born 18 months earlier start flexing on their own. DEEP will receive relatively few reports of sightings from December to March. Outside of those times, the state is Bear World, and humans just live in it.

"They come out of winter hibernation and start getting active as early as March, and most are out of hibernation by late April, and then they're wandering around looking for food," Rego told Patch.

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The DEEP biologists have a good handle on our ursine neighbors' comings and goings because they have been studying their habits for decades. Each year technicians will tag the ears of the beasts with a different color code (we're currently in the "pink" season) and track the animals' migration.

The system also allows DEEP to keep an eye on the troublemakers, or as Rego more politely phrased it, "identify a bear that is involved in repeat conflicts."

Ten years ago, DEEP was able to identify a bear as one who "had taken a liking to killing goats and sheep," Rego said. Their tracking system informed the biologists that it was just one bad bear going on a tear, and not a new trend of the whole population.

If you need to protect your goats and sheep from bear clutches, Rego says electric fencing, "one with pretty good power to it," is the way to go. Anything else won't cut it.

"An 8-foot chain link fence with barbed wire stretched across the top is nothing for a bear to climb up and go over,"the wildlife expert said.

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