Forest techs do their best to protect people from bears in Sequoia National Park, while treating the animals with affection and respect

SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — Say a furry beast lumbers out of the woods, weighing as much as you do, making goo-goo eyes at your leftover beans and franks. You may be hesitant. You may be scared. You may be inclined to seek out a ranger, whimpering, "There’s a bear. What are you going to do?"

That’s when you need a guy like Yarkovich. Joe Yarkovich. Wears a uniform. Messes with bears.

"It’s very technical," he likes to explain when the whimpering campers approach. Then Yarkovich, 28 years old, head shaved, weighing in at 175 pounds, starts in with the tough love. He sprints full tilt at a black bear about his size, screaming, "Hey bear! Get going! Get outta here!" and maybe blasting the animal’s face with pepper spray. Hazing, they call it.

So here we go. Night falls as Yarkovich sets off to cruise the tall trees and crowded campgrounds. He is one of three seasonal technicians who chase after a handful of radio-collared troublemaker bears, about three dozen that wear ID tags, and an additional 400 to 500 still untagged.

In the back of the truck lie the night-vision goggles, the shotgun and rubber bullets, telemetry instruments, slingshot and pepper balls. On his belt, Yarkovich wears a Mag-Lite and a canister of pepper spray. For hours we prowl, spotting prints at Round Meadow, checking radio transmissions.

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Yarkovich warns campers in stern tones that a fed bear is a dead bear and visitors should never leave food or odorous items unattended. In Dorst Campground we hear last night’s report.

"He stood right between those trees," proclaims 11-year-old Nicholas from Monrovia, pointing to a spot 10 feet from the family tent.

We believe Nicholas. But Yarkovich knows that plenty of campers put out food for bears, then claim innocence. He reminds them that Sequoia’s bears have broken windows and bent door frames, all to reach human food that typically cuts a bear’s lifespan in half. Many rangers say the animals not only recognize uniforms, but individuals.

But where are they now? With midnight approaching, Yarkovich steps from the SUV, pulls on headphones to take a telemeter reading, hears the telltale steady beeps. Then he advances warily into a campground-adjacent forest gully, bushwhacking.

There’s no sound but snapping twigs and fleeing bats, no light but the moon through the redwoods and the dancing beams of two Mag-Lites. The telemeter says "White 68." Teen female. History of campsite burglary, 150 pounds when the summer began. She’s close, and strangely still.

Yarkovich plays his beam across a redwood trunk nearly broad enough to hide a Hummer. And then the bear tech suddenly stops.

"Over the winters, you miss the bears," Yarkovich’s colleague Louie Long, a three-season bear tech, has admitted.

"They just fascinate me," Yarkovich tells me, a few minutes before our descent into Blair Witch territory. "They’re incredibly smart animals. We had one who learned how to use his tongue as a third hand to open the latch on bear boxes."

But this is a complex attachment, what with the teeth-baring and arm-waving, the slingshots and rubber bullets and, in the case of White 56, the occasional bout of cub-thuggery. White 56 is a mama bear. In early summer, as she taught her 15-pound cub the way around the park, White 56 had a brainstorm. As near as the bear techs can tell, she realized that humans were less likely to harm her cub than other bears, which sometimes kill one another’s young. So White 56 started stashing the cub in campsite-adjacent trees. To stop her, Yarkovich had to instill a big fear of man.

So he crept close to the treed cub, hit him with a burst of pepper spray — "and he made the most adorable face you’ve ever seen. It’s hard to spray a baby animal in the face with pepper. I felt like a bully," confessed Yarkovich.

There are worse days. Retrieving the 140-pound, "beautiful blond" bear killed by a car over the Independence Day weekend, for instance. Or destroying Yellow 27. A 110-pound male, Yellow 27 discovered in July that campers would leave their food behind if he ran at them. Reluctantly, they shot him.

"When they get scared or feel threatened, they’ll huff and clack their jaws. You can hear their teeth pretty good," says Yarkovich. "If you act like you want to fight, they’ll basically take off ... unless they’re on food. That’s different. They’re pretty reluctant to get off food, once they’re on it."

And forest gullies, I’m thinking. How do they behave in forest gullies?

But Yarkovich isn’t talking. He unfreezes and points down with his Mag-Lite. His shoulders slump.

At the end of the beam, next to a dead log, lies a collar. White 68’s collar.

They fall off, Yarkovich explains, if a bear’s neck thickens from weight gain. After a summer of picnic table pilfering, White 68 is not only smarter than the average bear but fatter. Probably about 215 now. The next day, Yarkovich gets word that while we were bushwhacking, White 68 was at Dorst, grabbing and gulping somebody’s bread, wrapper and all.

It’s a paradox, the bear-tech life: You chase and mace the ones you love. You give thanks for those that keep their distance. And when one proves shrewd enough to leave you in a gully while she lifts loaves among the Winnebagos, you have to bow — and worry that those smarts will one day do her in.

Relocating problem bears doesn’t work most of the time; they just come back

Troublesome black bears exiled to backwoods areas return home or die trying, a recent study finds, and some wildlife biologists say bear-resistant trash containers — not relocation — may be the only cure for a growing problem.

People and bears — as many as 30,000 in California — run into each other these days in campgrounds and neighborhoods springing up in mountainous areas. Yosemite National Park reported 214 human-bear encounters in the first half of this year, a 149 percent increase over the same period in 2003.

When bruins pillage ice chests, harass campers or bust car windows, they often get a tranquilizer dart and a one-way ticket out of Dodge. Or so scientists thought until two Nevada researchers discovered that transplanted bears didn’t stay put in their new digs.

Carl Lackey, a biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, and University of Nevada researcher Jon Beckmann, now with the Wildlife Conservation Society, captured eight bears in the Lake Tahoe basin between 1997 and 2002, moved them to the Sweetwater Range and the Pine Nut Mountains in western Nevada and tracked them using radio collars. Seven returned to the Tahoe basin within 18 days, and the eighth was struck by a car.

Their study, published in the May issue of the journal Western North American Naturalist, challenges animal relocation, the most common nonlethal method of managing pesky animals. Other studies have reached similar conclusions, including one in the 1980s that showed cougars traveled 300 miles after relocation.

"Relocation doesn’t work," Lackey says. "Nine times out of 10, they’re back at the capture site in weeks, or die trying to get home."

The studies persuaded Nevada wildlife officials to relocate bears only in rare instances. California wildlife managers relocate bears from urban areas and issue permits to destroy bruins that damage property or threaten people.

Close encounters imperil bears. U.S. Forest Service officials destroyed a sow and her cub in July after the cub jumped a Boy Scout to get snacks in the youth’s backpack. A few weeks later, Department of Fish and Game personnel destroyed a bear after it bit a hiker near Pothole Lake in the Sierra. And earlier this year, a bear sauntered into a Lake Tahoe kitchen, sat by a table and ogled a plate of bacon, only fleeing when a resident whacked its nose with a spoon.

Authorities have killed 94 bears in the last four years on the California side of Lake Tahoe, says Ann Bryant, director of the Bear League, a Homewood, Calif.,-based conservation group. "People leave food outside for the cute cubs," Bryant says. The bears know "a garbage can or open kitchen door is a lot easier than getting grubs from under a tree stump."

The two Nevada scientists have concluded that bear-resistant trash containers best protect animals from self-destructive behavior, but they are not widely used. The scientists say dogs, Mace and rubber bullets fail to deter hungry bears; the animals flee to a tree, wait for nightfall and return to forage while people sleep.

Three out of four California and Nevada counties bordering Lake Tahoe require bear-proof containers once an animal raids rubbish, but they cost $400 to $1,200, and the ordinance is difficult to enforce. Bryant’s group offers advice to homeowners on how to prevent bear mischief. And the state can fine property owners who leave food unprotected, but California does not prohibit feeding wildlife.