Bear Burdens
Ron Johnston has become pretty handy with what he calls his “bear nuisance gun.”
The town of Webb police chief has on several occasions needed to fire the weapon, an orange-handled pistol/noisemaker called a Screamer Siren, to scare off black bears tempted into human habitats in and around Old Forge. “It’s just a glorified firework,” Johnston says, “but it’s pretty effective.”
One memorable incident took place a couple of years ago. A satellite-dish installer had crawled under the deck of a long-unoccupied home near First Lake to hook up DirecTV. Trouble was, a sow bear and her cubs had taken up residence there. “Mom was not happy,” Johnston says.
Perhaps the bears were satisfied with cable.
In any event, the worker scrambled away and called the cops, and a short time later, Johnston shot a wailing round into the air that sent the bruins skedaddling, never to return. The installer? “He was—how do I put this?” Johnston asks. “Frightened, to say the least.”
Johnston chalked it up to just another day in the Adirondack Park. “We get a lot of interactions with bears,” he says.
But recently, human-bear encounters in the Adirondacks have skyrocketed like
