EAGLE POINT — A brash black bear with a taste for horse grain and a nose for mischief crossed paths with country singer Kristy Lee Cook one too many times and found himself on the wrong end of a gun. Four times the bruin burgled her horse barn in rural Eagle Point, tearing up the stalls and gobbling through garbage cans full of grain before Cook caught up with it on night No. 5 while singing a new tune.

“He was making a nice, huge mess of himself and, obviously, the horses were freaking out,” Cook says. “I went out my front door and shot him.”

And this is no solo bear story. State wildlife biologists have discovered a four-fold jump in the numbers of black bears legally killed in the Rogue Valley this year after causing damage or otherwise showing no fear of people in their quest for easy meals.

Eighteen black bears have been shot after trying to break into homes or causing damage to garages or barns from Ashland to Eagle Point and in the Grants Pass area since coming out of their makeshift hibernations in spring, according to Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife statistics. Typically, the area averages about four such cases a year, and usually they involve bears that are too fond of garbage and conditioned over time to associate humans with food. But this year’s man-verses-bruin confrontations have included bears trying to go through the back door to an Ashland house, raiding a Jacksonville honey farm and eating a pig near Rogue River.

“It’s an extraordinary year,” says Rosemary Stussy, an ODFW wildlife damage biologist in Central Point. “Some of these bears have been getting away with it for too long, then there’s an escalation. Then, they end up getting killed.” Tom Pomes has witnessed that escalation in recent years at his rural Murphy house on 5.5 acres. Wildlife always has been welcomed at Pomes’ house, and he’s put up with the occasional damage from a particular black bear knocking down the barbecue or gnawing through bird feeders. He keeps his garbage inside his garage and dumps liquid detergent in his can when it’s left out for pickup. But nothing prepared him for his face-to-face encounter May 5.

That’s when he walked to his living room’s picture window to discover a large black bear with its front paws on the glass as if it were about to push through. “The only thing between me and that big bear were dual-pane windows,” says Pomes, 60. He considered shooting the bear with a pistol he now keeps near the window, but the bear left. After regular returns, Pomes came face-to-face with the bear again early July 10. Instead of running when Pomes yelled and waved his arms, the bear started swaying back and forth as if to challenge him, Pomes says. “It scared the crap out of me,” he says

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