UMATILLA — If you take 441 just north of the Mount Dora cutoffs and make a turn to the right, the scenery changes quickly enough to make you wonder if you aren’t a lot farther from home than you thought.
Suddenly the road kills aren’t flattened gray patches but exotic blotches of reptilian yellows and amphibian greens. Suddenly the landmarks aren’t strip malls and subdivisions, but a feed store, a sawmill, a slaughterhouse. Suddenly, although it’s just an hour’s drive from downtown Orlando, you’ve reached a place where the woods are dense, the pastures are misty, the hills are steep -- and there’s a big, hairy monster on the loose.
Wildlife officials can’t catch it. Children are so frightened of it they refuse to walk to their bus stops in the morning. And the goats of Umatilla are afraid. Very afraid.
Since early June, inside a 10-mile radius of rural countryside filled with small farms and secluded homes, a rampaging black bear has attacked and killed dozens of goats, several chickens, one potbellied pig and one sheep. Maybe.
There are enough theories about the attacks to stock a Sasquatch Web site. Wildlife officials think the culprit is probably an adult male bear of about 350 pounds that has migrated here from the Ocala National Forest, just seven densely wooded miles to the northeast, and developed a taste for goats. Locals say it’s the mama bear and two cubs they’ve seen during the past few months, foraging at large trash bins and playing along the wood line. Others contend it’s not a single bear at all, but a pack of them — and they aren’t, by any stretch, newcomers.
“The bears are out there. Lord, of course they’re out there. They’ve always been out there. Why is everybody all of a sudden so surprised?” says Mike Lee.
Lee tends the counter at Lee’s Feed Store on State Road 44, where sacks of feed and small packages of “Equine Edibles” share space with the featured display, a 4-foot-tall stack of WD-40. He wears a camouflage baseball cap and a T-shirt ripped off above the shoulders. Occasionally, when the mood suits him, he comes into the store with his goatee dyed green. He has lived in the area for 15 years and shares the opinion of many longtime residents: The bears haven’t changed. The neighborhood has.
Once, this stretch of northeast Lake County was a farming community. The farmers had cows and horses, animals that are normally too big and too aggressive to fall prey to bear attacks. The farmers had goats, pigs and chickens, too, but if they lost one — to a bear, or, just as likely, a fox — they shrugged it off. Predators were a fact of life, an occupational hazard, like the weather. To a farmer, it would make as much sense to call an electrician to screw in a light bulb as it would to call a game warden about a gutted-out nanny or a pig carried squealing into the woods.
But during the past three or four years, more and more new residents on smaller and smaller properties have appeared in the area.
“I remember, when I first came here 12 years ago, if I heard heavy footsteps on the other side of my fences, I knew it was bears,” says Wayne Lively, who lives in the area where the slew of attacks has been reported.
In those days, he could stand on his property, look around, and not see a single neighboring home.
These days, he sees 20.
Some of Lively’s new neighbors have built elaborate lakeside estates. But others wanted modest homes on 10-acre parcels in the woods, just big enough to support a small menagerie of chickens, rabbits, pigs — and goats.
From one perspective, it’s a petting zoo.
From another, it’s a buffet line.
Two emus stand watch over the gate in front of Eric and Vellissa Kleinbach’s 20-acre wooded spread off Calhoun Road. Ducks chase each other across their front yard, past a neatly groomed pen shared by a pig and three piglets. The couple saved for years and looked at more than 50 properties in the area before settling on this one, which they share with their son and their daughter — Barron, 10, and Grace, 6.
It’s a weekday morning, and the family is still settling into the routine of a new school year. Barron is looking for his backpack, Grace can’t find her shoes -- and Eric, a former Marine who now works as a landscaper, is setting off to check the pasture for casualties.
Five times during the past month, a bear has attacked the Kleinbachs’ small herd of goats, wounding one, killing 10 — including Perdy, Grace’s pet, named after Pongo’s mate in 101 Dalmatians.
Kleinbach leads the way through the woods, still cool and damp from the night, to a broad, luminous pasture, bright in the morning sun. A half-dozen goats cluster by a fence line. They’re all fine. Kleinbach switches directions and heads across the high grass, still wet from the dew, toward a shaded corner where a 4-foot wire fence cuts through the trees.
The bear has been here, though you have to look closely to tell.
There’s a tuft of hair — black and brown strands, about 3 inches long, dangling from the cross-hatched wire of the fence. There are scratch marks on the tree where the bear hung on for leverage as it came across, and a 2-foot section of the fence that has been bent across the top.
Kleinbach points to a place, just on the other side of the fence, where two strong saplings stand about 5 feet apart. A small gray cable is just visible at the base of one of the trees. “That’s where they set the snare,” he says. “Obviously, we didn’t get lucky last night.”
Obviously. The snare, set by wildlife biologists the day before, is just the latest futile effort to try to capture the culprit bear.
“Our big problem is that this bear roams around so much. It’s hard to catch up,” says Florida state biologist Mark Asleson. Besides the snares, Asleson has set out culvert-style traps at several of the properties where the bear has taken goats. The contraptions, which look like oversized metal drain pipes, have been stuffed with everything from dead goats to doughnuts to try to lure the bear.
“I don’t think this bear is interested in doughnuts,” says Steve Bishop. “I’ve got a neighbor who says they must be out to catch a patrolman or a truck driver if they’re using bait like that.”
Amid all the speculation and rhetoric that has accompanied the bear attacks, Bishop, volleyball coach at Lake Sumter Community College, is a rarity: an eyewitness.
Eight days ago, on a Saturday morning, he awoke to find that one of the sheep on his property on Lake County Road 439, where many of the bear attacks have occurred, had been killed in the night. He says he called a state game commission hotline to report the attack and was told someone would get in touch with him on Monday.
“I said to him: ‘What, you think the bears take the weekend off?’ “
He decided to leave the sheep carcass out to see if the bear would return for it when darkness fell. Sure enough, it did. Bishop watched from a safe distance and saw what he describes as “a big old boy, just a regular black bear, probably about 36 inches high when he was standing on all fours. When I yelled and ran at him, he dropped the sheep and took off over the fence.”
If and when the problem bear is captured, biologists will probably release it in the Ocala National Forest. Bears are listed as a threatened species in Florida, and a hunter or homeowner who kills one in anything but a life-threatening situation risks a heavy fine and a jail term.
Last May, a 50-year-old schoolteacher was attacked, killed and partially eaten in Great Smoky Mountain National Park by two female black bears, a 112-pound adult and a 40-pound yearling. It was the first recorded killing of a human by a black bear in the southeastern United States.
There is no record of any human ever being attacked by a black bear in Florida. That is no consolation whatsoever to Vellissa Kleinbach.
“I’m not interested in setting any records here,” she says. “Goats are one thing. But if that bear is getting accustomed to human beings, I’m afraid for my children.”
She says that Barron and Grace used to enjoy walking down a shaded dirt path to the highway to catch the bus to school. Now she drives them. Last week, Barron came running into the house, screaming: He’d heard a chain saw in the distance, and mistook it for a roaring bear.
“I suppose this sounds funny, but we came here from Miami,” says Kleinbach. “We thought it would be safer here.”
