Despite the impression left by a flurry of news reports this spring, armies of marauding bears are not mounting a stealthy assault on rural Maine.

“It’s a pretty normal year, but it seems to have gathered a bit of publicity,” said Gene Dumont, a Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife biologist who oversees nuisance wildlife complaints statewide.

Each spring, bears awake from hibernation before much of the plant food they prefer has bloomed. Drowsy and hungry, they go wandering in search of food and follow every smell – be it seeds on the forest floor or a bowl of kibbles in a suburban back yard.

“Often the food is scarce,” said Sally Stockwell, a wildlife biologist with Maine Audubon. “They’re looking for anything to get their digestive system up and running again. They’ll eat whatever is available.”

Every year since the 1980s, the state has received at least 200 calls from farmers and homeowners worried about these “nuisance” bears. Each spring a story or two makes it into the press.

But this spring, a rare incident of a young bear shot in the streets of South Portland and the pending referendum on whether to ban bear trapping and hunting with bait or dogs have sent bear complaints to the front page.

Those behind the referendum accuse their opponents of using nuisance bears to frighten the public into voting in their favor this fall.

“It’s getting overblown,” said Cecil Gray of Hunters for Fair Bear Hunting. “They’re obviously trying to link [nuisance complaints] to this theoretical bear increase.”

George Smith of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine frequently has spoken about the increased nuisance complaints that would occur if, as predicted by DIF&W, the bear population expands drastically without baited hunts as a means of population control – even going so far as to say that children could be at risk. Groups opposing the referendum have released a long list of bear attacks from across the nation.

But Edie Leary, spokeswoman for Maine’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Council, the coalition of hunting groups that is leading the fight against the baiting ban, recently said that the group is making no special effort to increase reporting of nuisance bear incidents. Though dozens of calls come in to the council’s headquarters, Leary is leaving nuisance bears to the biologists, she said.

“It’s certainly something that affects the campaign. It helps bring to the forefront that fact that we do need to control the bear population,” Leary said. “[But] I don’t want to politicize it.”

Maine’s record-keeping has been hit-or-miss over the years, but state biologists estimate nuisance bear complaints at 200 to 300 annually, with spikes during drought years such as 1995 and 2001 when food was scarce.

This year also may show a slight increase in bear problems because of the unusual weather, though it’s too early to prove it with statistics, said state bear biologist Jennifer Vashon.

The early snowmelt and cold, wet spring likely combined to create a particularly tough season for bears. They awoke from hibernation early and went prowling for food, and a lack of sunshine has delayed the berry crop, Vashon said.

“Bears were coming out of their dens and the food wasn’t ready,” she said.

But with a population of about 23,000 bears, even 300 annual complaints is relatively minor compared to other states where people are living in greater proximity to bear habitat, said Stockwell, whose employer, Maine Audubon, has decided not to take sides on the bear referendum.

Wildlife officials from Vermont, where about 3,500 to 4,500 bears resulted in more than 700 nuisance complaints last year, and from Pennsylvania, where 15,000 bears resulted in “hundreds upon hundreds of calls,” backed up Stockwell’s claim.

Most of Maine’s complaints result in some action by biologists, but situations such as the South Portland case, where a bear is shot to protect public safety, are very rare in Maine, Dumont said.

“Sometimes, bears will come in and out of town, and people don’t even know it,” he said.

Some argue that baiting makes the problem worse by teaching bears to associate food with the smell of humans and encouraging them to venture into town in search of garbage.

But the role of bait is still being debated within the wildlife community. A few research studies suggest that bears have the ability to learn that humans are sources of food. Others dispute it.

And the fact that bears fed from Maine’s open dumps long before there was a major baiting industry here suggests that hunters can’t be saddled with all the blame.

Rather, it’s inevitable that bears occasionally will come wandering into back yards, when houses and farms are built within their territories, Stockwell said.

“As with all wild animals when we develop that land, their habitat shrinks,” she said.

Most people who have bears for neighbors don’t even realize the bears are there. Black bears tend to be timid, yet, like any wild animal, they may fight if they can’t run, particularly if a mother bear feels that her cubs are in danger.

A handful of farm animals, particularly small creatures such as chickens, piglets and lambs, are eaten by hungry bears every spring; and every year, beekeepers struggle to keep the bears out of their hives, Dumont said.

But Maine’s last human death by bear occurred so long ago that no one at the state Bureau of Health could even give it a date. Until last week’s incident in which a Standish teen was scratched by a bear in his yard, Maine’s last publicized bear attack was in 1997. It involved a hunting guide who was injured by a bear that fell onto him from high in a tree after an inexperienced hunter shot the animal in the rear end.

“No one [in Maine] has ever had a bear come into their house or back yard and kill them,” said Gray, who works as a hunting guide. “I’ve seen a lot of bear in the woods. They see me and run like hell.”

Unlike grizzly and polar bears, black bears – the only bears that live in Maine – are not known for their aggression. With 750,000 black bears living in North America, only 52 people are known to have been killed by them in the last century.

Compare that to more than 80 people killed by 35,000 grizzly bears, and you have black bears being 26 times less dangerous than their Western cousin, said biologist Lynn Rogers of the Wildlife Research Institute in Ely, Minn., where he has studied bears since 1971.

In fact, the likelihood of being killed by a black bear is statistically lower than that of being killed by lightning, bee stings or a dog attack, said Rogers, who is a hunter as well as a biologist. He has been following the debate in Maine but decided not to take a position.

“Whether a bear in someone’s yard is a joy or a problem just depends on that person’s attitude,” Rogers said. “They evolved this very timid attitude, and that serves them well today when we want them to be good citizens in a human-dominated landscape.”

The biologist has heard of bears fleeing from not only people but also from house cats, flocks of ducks and “little yapping dogs,” he said.

Bears will run from noise, but the best way to avoid coming in contact with a bear is not to attract the bear in the first place, biologists said. A few precautions, such as keeping garbage well-covered and taking down bird feeders, can thwart most hungry bears.

“It’s not really that different from trying to protect your house from raccoons or skunks,” Stockwell said.

Historically, DIF&W has responded to all nuisance complaints, with remedies ranging from cleaning up a back yard to trapping bears and moving them 40 to 60 miles away, to chasing a bear off with hunting dogs, or the rare instances in which a bear must be killed by a biologist or game warden.

“If we feel there’s an imminent public safety concern, we’ll get our staff involved and do whatever it takes,” Dumont said.

This year, the DIF&W lost its entire nuisance wildlife budget as a result of last summer’s statewide budget cuts.

Biologists developed a new policy which places the financial burden on homeowners, who now must hire independent animal damage control agents – about 400 trappers certified by the state – to handle nuisance wildlife in all but emergency situations. Biologists will offer their time and advice, but that’s all they can do, Dumont said.

“We, like every state agency, are dealing with budget problems,” Vashon said. “Our hands are tied.”