Tonight I went to a program arranged by the Susquehanna Township police department and the neighboring Lower Paxton Township police department designed to educate local residents about living with the urban black bear. A bear biologist employed by the state Fish and Game Commission was announced as the featured speaker, and I decided to go to feed two research needs: character building for my fiction and details for my nonfiction essays (in draft as you read!) about twenty-first century domestic life in a suburban tract development.

One of the hardest things for me in fiction is placing people in appropriate work settings. I was a teacher all my life, and I really don't know what people do all day at what we used to call "real jobs," that is, the jobs I was in the business of preparing people to do or to study for. One of my characters, Barry, runs a vineyard. He needs a new woman in his life -- I think he's going to call on the services of a deer or bear biologist to instruct him and his employees on managing the wildlife population on his property.

I wrote about bears in this space exactly two years ago. That was right after a bear had visited our neighborhood and caused some concern among residents. A few days before, a bear had been wounded while trying to cross the highway and had to be euthanized by the game officers. This past fall a bear again visited our garden. This time Ron discovered it when he went outside just before bedtime to investigate a loud crash. He found the bear sitting under our central tree, helping itself to the bird feed.

In May of 1999 I wrote what might have turned into an impassioned screed about our responsibility to bears as we take more and more of their habitat for our private residences. The human population in Susquehanna Township has tripled in the last fifteen years as "townhouse developments" have begun to occupy the acreage of what were once two large farms and the three areas at the base of the mountain (where "luxury single family homes" are erected on "homesites," not "building lots") go as far up as they can (about 150 feet, the upper limit for being able to deliver the municipal water services required now).

I learned tonight that bear habitat actually improved over the last half of the twentieth century. Old growth forests that had been cleared by the original (white) settlers in the eighteenth century have grown back. In addition, we've seen a long string of seasons that have been good for bear fertility and infant survival -- in other words, the natural bear economy has perked along like Wall Street's financial bull economy, and these are good times for bruins. Pennsylvania could handle another tripling of the bear population before there would be a problem. It's not that Pennsylvania's natural resources can't support both bears and humans, it's that we have more and stronger bears that we're living closer and closer to.

Nevertheless, there are certain bears that become what local authorities call "nuisance bears." The worst thing that homeowners can do is actually feed the bears -- put abundance where bears can get it to deliberately attract them while you watch with your telephoto lens from the comfort of your family room. The bears can't tell which homeowners have left a basket of corncobs for them and which have merely put out the leavings of their weekend barbecue awaiting Wednesday's regular trash pickup. I learned that I might have to forego the pleasure of attracting birds to my property by taking down the feeders in the summer. (In summer, the birds don't need my largesse. In winter, when they do, the bears are not a problem.)

Bears' teeth acquire growth rings like those on trees. A female bear can begin breeding at the age of two and continue until she dies (a natural lifespan of thirty or forty years). She keeps her young with her for a year, and in the intervening season she does not breed. The growth rings on her teeth will be thin during the year she is pregnant because all her calcium goes to the fetuses. In the year she raises them, the ring will be thick.

Bear litters can be from one to five cubs. The average is three. Breeding takes place in the summer, but the embryos go dormant. If the female gains enough weight to support the pregnancy, gestation resumes in the late autumn when they prepare to "den" for the winter. Pennsylvania bears don't hibernate as western bears do. Their body temperature remains normal and though they doze for many hours they can be roused to alertness easily. It's their metabolism that slows, and along with their greatly reduced physical activity, they regulate the consumption of the body fat they've accumulated over the summer. I saw a bear fetus taken from a road-killed mother who didn't make it to the den that year. It was less than two inches long, a deep chocolate color, and it looked like a plastic charm for a bracelet floating in a jar of preservative.

The local television station sent a reporter and a photographer to the event. The reporter saw me taking notes and asked me later if I would be interviewed on camera. She asked me why I'd come, and I said not only was I a concerned resident, I was a fiction writer gathering material for a story. I just watched the final piece, which featured mostly the energetic and knowledgeable bear biologist who conducted the program. Although I'd talked to the reporter for about two minutes, my part was edited to a sound bite about resolving to bring in the bird feeder for the summer.

Maybe the habits of a working fiction writer should have their own informational program.