Mabel Meets a Black Bear

Twin girls staying with their parents in a Smokies rental cabin learn the hard way why humans should never allow bears access to our own food, scraps, and garbage.This picture book for ages 5 to 10 employs rhyming verse and beautiful, heart-warming illustrations to deliver a difficult educational message about not feeding bears. Back matter provided by national BearWise® experts explains the growing need for more people to become savvy about how to store food and garbage when in bear country and directs readers to BearWise.org for the basics of coexisting with bears. When bears get access to the food humans eat and feed their pets, they come to expect this kind of food, which is often much easier for bears to obtain than their natural diets of nuts and berries. Bears have a powerful sense of smell–100 times as many olfactory sensors as we have–so the tempting aromas of food and garbage are bound to attract them. Bears have excellent long-term memory and a highly evolved ability to make connections. They eat what is readily available and teach their young what they have learned about obtaining food. When they can more easily access the food that humans eat and feed to their pets, they become food conditioned, and their conflict behavior escalates.When a bear hurts someone–as when the story’s narrator, Louise, gets knocked down by a bear lured by her sister, Mabel–wildlife managers must often euthanize the bear because it has become a threat. Although Mabel and Louise learn a hard lesson with help from a wildlife biologist named Kevin, their parents support them, and they grow up to help educate others about being BearWise®.