Bear Stories

8:00 AM temp: 24
Yesterday: 41/24
Normal: 56/31

We watched as a black bear walked through the yard one night in November. It left these tracks next to the house.

The bears are out and about again. According to the paper, a turkey hunter in the southern part of the valley was charged by a grizzly that was, along with her two yearling cubs, feeding on a deer carcass. A motion camera subsequently placed near the spot filmed a large male grizzly feeding on the carcass the same evening.

Closer to home, it would be surprising to see a grizzly in the neighborhood, but we did have a black bear scavenging for garbage here in the fall. We came home from a weekend of camping to find a bag of trash (not ours) strewn around the back yard along with several piles of bear droppings. While on our walks over the next week or so we occasionally saw garbage cans knocked over. Then one night around 2 a.m. Steve happened to get up and look out the window, catching sight of the bear walking up through the back yard toward the house.

As the bear walked around the side of the house we ran to a glass door and pulled up the shade, and the bear was standing just a few feet away from us. It ambled on around to the front of the house and across the street. When it started checking out garbage cans we decided to try to scare it off, waving flashlights and yelling from our front porch. It wasn’t too worried about us, but eventually did shuffle off.

There was a skiff of fresh snow, so in the morning we followed his tracks around the neighborhood. He was obviously looking to strike it lucky with an unsecured garbage can. It didn’t look like he found any that night, but sadly people seem to be quite casual about leaving the cans outside with garbage in them.