A Yankee Notebook: Among the bears in Lyme

There are several good features of my current racket of working with a television program rooted in the outdoors. I get to visit places I’d never have been able to get to myself, or, in some cases, even heard of. I get to meet and interview some very interesting people. And I learn stuff the best way possible: by being immersed in it with the guidance of experts who live it.

Every once in a while, even with that, an experience or an interview sticks with me afterward, long after I’m back home. That was the case this past week when the crew and I visited the Kilhams — Ben, Debbie and Ethan — at the Kilham Bear Sanctuary in the woods of Lyme Center, out the Grafton Turnpike a short distance beyond the Dartmouth Skiway.

During our 40 years of living in Hanover, my family and I often heard about the bear sanctuary not many miles north of us. But it turns out that we harbored many misconceptions about its operation. We knew that Ben Kilham took in sometimes dozens of orphaned bear cubs, nurtured them through infancy and then released them into the wild. Boy, I thought, the woods around his house must be full of bears! I wondered how the neighbors managed to deal with that.

Then came this assignment and a chance to find out how he does it. He’s been at it for over 30 years now, and has developed a routine. I drove over from Montpelier early on a Monday morning to film an interview with him. We started indoors, in the air-conditioned conference room of what appeared to be a new office/storehouse/bear barn. Kiki, who’d been excited outdoors by the smell of bears, had been running in circles. In the conference room, Ben proffered her a sturdy and experienced hand, and she settled down beside his chair for a scratch. He found her sweet spot in about a second, and within a minute she was lying on her back for a belly scratch. Clearly, Ben knows his business.

His wife, Debbie, does, too. She brought a platter of freshly baked cookies piled high enough for a Hollywood production crew.

I felt an instant affinity for both of them, but especially Ben. He’s in his 70s, and has recently developed symptoms of Parkinson’s. I shared my neuropathy with him, and we settled into comfortable lawn chairs on the deck of the building.

“You’ve probably done this before,” I ventured. “Yes,” he smiled. “About a thousand times.” Ben and Debbie have been interviewed, filmed, and written about six ways to Sunday. Still, there was a lot I needed to know about his operation.

The newborn orphan cubs begin to come in during late winter, when mother bears and their cubs emerge from their dens. Mother, in one way or another, is killed, injured, or falls ill, and the tiny cubs are left to forage for themselves, which they can’t do yet. The commonest cause of orphanage seems to be that the mother is shot while raiding a chicken coop. As human habitation moves ever farther into the woods, it encroaches on the bears’ ancestral home, and a coop full of chickens, especially in the early spring, is like an ice cream truck to a famished bear.

The cubs are brought to the sanctuary mostly by Fish and Wildlife agents. Ethan, who’s lately taking over the day-to-day routine of caring for them, dons coveralls that look not a lot unlike a bear and tries to act like one in his interactions with them. Visitors are not welcome at the center, in order to keep the cubs as “wild” as possible. Bears naturally fear humans more than people fear them, and to keep everybody safe, the center tries to avoid habituation.

The little guys — 23 of them — were in a large screened room on one side of the barn. They wrestled just like puppies, climbed as fast as cats up handy chunks of tree trunk, swung in an old, suspended tractor tire, and splashed happily in a tub if water. The yearlings, on the other side, were much quieter, preferring to spend the hot day lounging quietly in their loft. They’re let out now and then to an electric-fenced patch of woods with ponds for splashing and dens for retreating to at hibernation time.

When they’re ready to leave, the agency that brought them picks them up and releases them somewhere. Thus is a calamitous beginning to a new life transformed into a second chance for a creature that the Kilhams are certain is one of the most intelligent to share our space on this part of the earth.