Trinity Nicholson, a regular camper at Bruce Peninsula National Park, came face to face with a bear there in late July. Ms. Nicholson, pictured here at Kerncliff Park in Burlington, Ont., says the encounter left her shocked but reminded her that ‘we’re invading their space, so we need to learn to be respectful.’Carlos Osorio/The Globe and Mail
Trinity Nicholson was sitting by a fire at Ontario’s Cyprus Lake Campground in late July, with her father and two friends, listening to car alarms going off in the distance, when she heard rustling in the woods behind her. Turning around, she locked eyes with a massive black bear close enough that she could reach out and touch his nose.
“I froze,” says Ms. Nicholson, a 30-year-old nurse from Burlington, Ont. “I was staring at it, and it was staring back at me, and for a couple of seconds I was in shock, because I had no idea what to do.”
She leapt out of her chair and said, “There’s a bear,” to her dad, who thought she was joking until he pointed a flashlight into the trees. Instantly, everyone was yelling, leaping out of their chairs to get to the far side of the fire, the bear watching the commotion from the shadows. “I’m crying at this point,” says Ms. Nicholson. Wanting to run, knowing she shouldn’t, her mind raced through options. They decided to fast-walk to their car about three metres way.
Ms. Nicholson’s husband, sleeping inside the locked car with the keys, awoke to shouting and banging – “Let us in! There’s a bear! We’re not joking!” He opened the door, they scrambled inside, while the bear sniffed around their campsite.
This summer, it became clear that Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula National Park had a messy human problem. The park is perched on the cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment, flanked by cottage country about 300 kilometres from Toronto. Camping reservations at Cyprus Lake are snatched up each spring “in a mad rush like getting Taylor Swift tickets,” as Ms. Nicholson put it, and by summer, the area is filled with grilling, picnicking city-dwellers.
So it’s not surprising that somewhere in his travels, a particularly clever and single-minded bear had discovered a tasty meal – perhaps ketchup abandoned on a picnic table, scraps on the ground or a marshmallow by the fire – and determined that the two-legged visitors to its home offered easier and more mouth-watering food sources than grass and berry bushes.
Encounters between humans and bears have been steadily rising in Canada over the last 10 years, according to national Parks Canada data. In 2024, the most recent year available, Parks Canada staff managed 423 “co-existence incidents” involving black bears and “unnatural attractants,” more than twice as many as 2010. Human food and garbage are regular enticements. But as residential areas push farther into bear territory, encounters increasingly involve gardens, lawns and fruit trees.
At the Cyprus Lake Campground this summer, park staff repeatedly reminded campers to clean their sites bare, to pack away even toothpaste and scented soap in their cars. They supplied “bear resistant” bins to store food, and banned cooking after dark. They policed campsites and confiscated condiments and leftovers carelessly left on picnic tables.
Twice, they trapped and transported the same 300-pound male bear deeper into the park. But bears can smell grease on a grill from kilometres away. Each time, he returned.
The bear that Ms. Nicholson encountered never seemed aggressive, she says. “As scary as it was in the moment, he didn’t seem interested in us at all.” The experienced campers had cleaned up their steak dinner and stowed their food and garbage in the trunk of the car. Startled by a noise, the bear eventually lumbered off, seeking snacks at its next stop.
But as weeks passed, he grew bolder: pulling down the windows of cars and climbing inside, prying open the hardtops of pick-up trucks for treats and overturning the bear-resistant bins so the loosely latched lids flipped open and spilled gourmet treasure.
Finally, park staff made the rare decision to close the campsite to safeguard both bear and human life – a closing now extended to Oct. 31.
For the last few weeks, every time they see the “the individual” – as staff call the bear, avoiding a more sentimental name – they yell and clang pots, and shoot bean bags, trying to restore a fear of humans greater than its appetite for barbecue leftovers.
“We want to give the best possible chance of a good outcome for the bear,” says Camille Girard-Ruel, the park’s superintendent.
Sadly, these hazing efforts rarely work, says Martyn Obbard, a research scientist emeritus with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, and an expert on the black bears of the Bruce Peninsula. “I certainly applaud the efforts to save the bear.”
While hiking Halfway Log Dump by Cyprus Lake campgrounds in the spring of 2025, John Goodhew came across two bears by the trailhead gates, including this one.John Goodhew/Supplied
But too often, the inevitable end is a dead bear. This month, a black bear habituated to approaching humans for food was euthanized in a Wyoming national park. “We need to be clear,” the park said in a Facebook post, “this bear was lethally removed because of poor decisions made by park visitors.”
And last year, in Yellowstone National Park, a black bear had to be put down after it repeatedly outsmarted food-storage measures – much like the one at Cyprus Lake.
“We underestimate the intelligence of these animals,” says Dr. Obbard. “When we give them easy access to high energy food and garbage, or even raiding coolers, they’re going to exploit that. And they’re damn good at it.”
A favourite example of bear ingenuity happened one summer, while Dr. Obbard was conducting research in Algonquin Provincial Park, in south-central Ontario. A black bear discovered that the tall white box on a cottage porch contained a delicious, chilled buffet. With the owners away at work, the bear leisurely visited one property after another, opening the outdoor refrigerators – until, Dr. Obbard says, it spotted the same white box through a kitchen window and smashed its way inside.
Ideally, the Bruce Peninsula bear in question wakes up next spring, discovers a bounty of berries and clover and beetles, and never thinks of peanut butter again. But hibernation doesn’t erase a bear’s memory, says Dr. Obbard. More likely, a whiff of burgers on the grill will have it haunting the Cypress Lake campground next year.
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Human-animal encounters like this raise a philosophical question, Dr. Obbard suggests: Having trespassed into its territory and caused the problem, what’s our responsibility to a single bear? “Some would say we do everything we can, and I would agree,” he says. “But everything we can may not be enough.”
In the end, the only bear-saving solution is prevention.
For decades, Dr. Obbard gave bear talks on best practices: finish cooking before dark, seal away toothpaste and soap, avoid sleeping in the same clothes you wore cooking, never feed human food to wildlife of any kind. And double-check bags and supplies. While backcountry camping with his family years ago, a nocturnal bear appeared at Dr. Obbard’s well-cleaned site, sniffing at his backpack. Jammed in the bottom, he found a forgotten, unused tea bag.
Bruce Peninsula park closely borders residences and tourist attractions that Ms. Girard-Ruel says also need to follow the same bear-safe practices around their houses and buildings – especially since the bear can’t be easily relocated.
He’s one of a few hundred genetically distinct bears living on the peninsula. Although not officially endangered, their low population and forced proximity to human development makes them vulnerable. It’s not clear how easily they’d adapt to a new location: Rather than using hollow logs and brush piles like other black bears, they mostly hibernate in limestone crevices along the Niagara Escarpment.
Kathleen Bowron and her husband slept at the Cyprus Lake Campground on Aug. 27 – the last evening before the park closed to overnight guests. Ms. Bowron says they listened for hours to screaming and car horns and the rumble of responding staff vehicles while a bear ravaged a site nearby – until, after midnight, she fell asleep wearing earplugs. She wasn’t worried: Their own campsite was bare of temptations.
“We’ve gotten used to be an apex predator,” she says. “And not many people understand that we still share space with wildlife. We need to protect it, as well as ourselves.”
At the end of the day, Ms. Nicholson says, “We’re invading their space, so we need to learn to be respectful. It’s their home, and we’re just guests.”