Close Encounters: Bears and Frick Park, Oh My!

July 20, 2013

Dick Wilford is an outdoorsy guy. He grew up in rural Western Pennsylvania, an avid hunter, a big-time camper—not uncommon traits for a kid from the country. But his fondness for nature wasn’t something he grew out of. He’s 58 now, and for two decades he’s worked as foreman of Frick Park—the biggest park in Pittsburgh. It sprawls some 561 acres and has an extensive trail system. One of his most memorable outdoor experiences, though, occurred when he travelled to visit family in a small town east of Pittsburgh called Blairsville.

“A number of years ago black bears weren’t that well known for that area, so if you’d ever seen a black bear it was something strange and something different,” says Wilford.

The day in question was a pleasant spring afternoon. The elderberries were ripe, and Wilford set out along an old farm road to pick some, so his wife could make an elderberry pie. The path was approximately 10 feet wide with brush growing on both sides.

“Behind that you had the open forest. I started walking along the road and I could hear something in the woods behind the brambles, walking,” says Wilford. At first, he thought it was some deer, but then he heard the brush crack loudly, and close.

“About 50 feet away from me I saw this small black object come out through the brambles. ... I thought it must be somebody’s collie dog, and I’m looking and I’m like, that’s not a dog. It’s a baby black bear,” he says.

Wilford says his mind started racing.

“I could picture every page that I had read, every program on TV, about never getting between a black bear cub and her mother.”

As he stood frozen on the narrow road—realizing he had no place to run—the cub casually turned up the road away from him.

Immediately, Wilford started walking backwards—as fast as he could without making any noise. He kept his eye on the exact spot the baby came out from, occaisionally glancing over his shoulder.

“And, it’s amazing. A bear that’s probably 200 pounds can walk through the woods and not make a noise. It’s like they float through the woods—not a brush crack. I’m looking at that spot continually, and [the mother] just appears, out of the brush,” he says.

Wilford stopped. He was only about 100 feet away.

“At that point I could basically study her. I mean they just glisten in the summer sun with that black fur," he says, "But what she did was she put her nose down, smelled the ground where the little one was, and just turned and walked up the road away from me and vanished around the corner.”

Wilderness Is Wild

From this experience, Wilford has taken to heart the very real notion that nature is wild. “It’s really kind of common sense: If we go into a natural area, we’ve got things that can hurt [us] at all times,” he says, listing off examples—bees, slippery rocks, and things like bears.

But in a park, he says, some people approach nature differently. “It’s kind of strange, because people seem to think that the wildlife is not really wild. They kind of assume that it’s more like a zoo, and we don’t want it to be that way.”

Of all the parks in Pittsburgh, Frick has the strongest commitment to remain as natural as possible. It’s actually part of the park’s founding mission and something the staff there has been getting back to in recent years. They’re letting manicured areas grow into grassy fields. They’re letting wetlands redevelop. And thus, “there’s more animals now in the park than there used to be,” Wilford says.

Visitors are happy to welcome certain critters. Bluebirds, for instance, were spotted in the park last year for the first time in at least 40 years, Wilford says. But many people are less happy to encounter animals like the park's most recent newcomers, the coyotes.

Coyotes use the banks of the Monongahela River as a running ground, Wilford says, and have started to infiltrate the park. “Coyotes are really really smart. They’re hard to trap in a box trap or anything.”

Similarly, there are the snakes.

“We had a lady last year that insisted that we collect every snake in the park and take them to another park and make a snake refuge area,” Wilford says.

Wilford only moves snakes if he decides there’s a direct threat—for instance, if there’s one on a playground. Instead, he is focusing on ramping up efforts to teach the public how to co-exist safely with wildlife. This is an ongoing project at the Frick Environmental Center.

In the meantime, Wilford will continue to weigh the options every day when someone calls to complain about a turkey or a snake or a snapping turtle. Soon, he expects there could even be a resident black bear in Frick Park. The animal’s population has more than tripled in Pennsylvania since the 1970s and tracks have already been spotted along the perimeter of Frick.

Keeping his own experience in mind, Wilford says he’d be happy to know there’s a bear out there in the park. But what’s not clear to him is whether the public would feel the same.