The population obviously hasn't quadrupled since Yosemite closed to visitors on March 20th. It is remarkable though to see how quickly wildlife is willing to re-enter areas that have historically been overrun with humans!
All: Obviously the bears weren't born in the last month. Please assume basic intelligence in your fellow readers.
Edit: Ok you guys, I surrender. There is no fighting the dreaded title fever. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
So if the cause is migration, the headline kind of needs that, as we're talking about wildlife and not human settlements.
Subjective claims are fine, maybe you misunderstood the headline (although by definition anyone complaining about the wording actually didn't misunderstand it). But that's an empirical claim that could be tested. And my suspicions are that almost no one in the target audience would think for one second that the bears have reproduced enough in less than one year to quadruple in population.
After a few seconds of thinking about it, it’s obvious that 4x the bears were not born there, but it’s just interesting enough to get a click, to find out what the headline really means, and therefore is a type of clickbait.
A random hotel employee is seeing and hearing about more bears because there are less humans and bears have stopped hibernating.
Some bears may be encroaching on human areas more often, which would result in a huge sampling bias.
The typical ranger response is either paintball guns or pepper spray so the animals don't think humans are a threat, just that the food is not worth paintballs and pepper spray. With no humans to push them back, they'll take over the park scouring for the food that they expect to find.
Most national parks operate on a strike system for the wildlife, Yosemite is the only one I'm aware of that will keep annoying a bear away even if it steals food every day for a week.
I appreciate every sighting. Not complaining. If they are going to venture in an urban setting like my Bay Area city, I can only imagine how it must be to test the boundaries unabused at Yosemite.
This is just the natural response of the local ecosystem from having reduced numbers of competitors for resources.
This is no different from the human population of cities - it goes up or down not just due to births and deaths, but also due to individuals moving in or out.