In suburbia, it's a wild, wild life

Black bears, meanwhile, generated a record 1,702 such health-and-safety reports last year, a 59 percent rise since 1998, the agency reported. Feral hogs, which live in 23 states, including California and Texas, caused a surge of damage throughout the 1990s, peaking in 2000.

Mountain lion health-and-safety incidents also peaked in 1999 at 435, thereafter drifting downward to 207 last year. But high publicity over mountain-lion attacks and sightings in California this year could lead to a rise in numbers since myriad dubious sightings are often spawned by a single accurate report.

Such statistics hardly represent a complete national picture, Wildlife Services officials are quick to point out. They do not include cases undertaken by state wildlife agencies or by private companies. But they broadly confirm what states and localities have been experiencing, they say.

"Yes, urban people appear to have an increasing conflict with wildlife and an increasing variety of wildlife, especially over the last decade," says Robert Hudson, a USDA Wildlife Services biologist.

In New Jersey, for example, reports of bear sightings, damage to property, and collisions with cars rose 425 percent between 1995 and 2003, according to a recent state status report. Four cases in the past four years involved attacks on humans.

Some wildlife officials see a silver lining to the rising number of reports.

"As our [efforts] to better protect habitat and reduce contaminants in the environment have succeeded, we have certainly seen a rebound of wildlife populations across a range of species," says Bradley Campbell of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection. "In most cases, the return of wildlife even to suburban areas is a positive development."

But there's also a need for better education of the public, he adds. Many suburbanites in the state feed the bears, or at least don't put away barbecue grills and trash - boosting the number of bears bumbling into the burbs, he says.

More habitat for animals - and people living in that animal habitat - is the reason for growing human-wildlife encounters, says Gordon Batcheller, a wildlife biologist with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation in Albany. He points out that a wide swath of newly forested land covering the Northeast - best observed from an airliner window at 30,000 feet - has resulted in more wild animals appearing in the burbs there.

"There's been a landscape-scale change over the past 100 years," Dr. Batcheller says. "Land that was intensively farmed was abandoned and the brush, shrubs, and forest came back. So now we have a vast forested landscape in which these animals can live. The animals are present, so are people, and that leads to interactions. And they're not always happy."

Deer, for instance, were hunted until they were almost gone. But restoration efforts combined with reforestation mean about 1 million deer now roam in New York, Mr. Batcheller estimates, resulting in thousands of car-deer collisions annually.

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