We chose to live in the woods, so we really shouldn’t complain; however, there comes a point … and it has come.
Nevertheless, while I am grateful we don’t live in Alaska, I never expected our neighborhood would come with personal bears. While shoppers in Lambertville are joining a scavenger hunt for hidden polar bears in the hopes of winning a gift basket, my neighbors and I in Durham are still being visited by the real thing.
A real bear has been doing his midnight snacking on our deck. This is not our first encounter with the furry creatures. I have seen two bears in the past few years and just last summer found fresh tracks in a muddy patch in our lawn, uncomfortably close to the house. My bear count does not include the guy who visits in the dark of night.
My neighbors have reported many sightings, so many they’re not really news anymore. But this late in the year? Some of us wonder if the big beasts will continue to hang around if winters continue to trend warmer and the need for hibernation goes the way of icebergs.
Just last week at our house, we found two empty feeders wrenched from the wire that holds them and tossed on the ground far below our second-floor deck. We knew squirrels couldn’t do that and so we blamed raccoons, thinking the bears were snoozing.
Now, having heard about one of our neighbor’s struggles with a bear, we think Mr. Bruin or Ms. Bruin is our villain – more likely Mr., as I understand females go into hibernation earlier than males.
My funny and dear neighbor, Sabra Fenske, emailed me about her experience. She wrote, “So, it turns out our nocturnal deck problems are not coons after all. I just had a run-in with a really big black bear … Maybe it was brown–hard to say in the dark. Sure looked black. Incredibly shiny. I chased him off the deck at least four times – the last time he really didn’t go more than to the end of the deck, just off it in the lawn. I’m not thrilled about having a bear that doesn’t run off.”
In a way, in the midst of this terrible pandemic, a bear problem can be a bit of a lark. After all, the black bears around here are not nasty like the grizzlies, Most tend to do their dirty work while humans are sleeping, so encounters are generally limited to the times we invade their woods, which really belong more to them than to us.
Black bears tend to be more mischievous than violent. They also hide from people more often than not. Cartoonists often see them as more comical than threatening. Just don’t get too close to their cubs. Still, I would prefer not to come eye-to-eye with a black bear. They can hit speeds of 30 miles an hour, but as my husband reminds me, “You don’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than the guy you’re with.”
I am glad I don’t live near the Brooks River in Katmai National Park in Alaska, a kind of grizzly bear Mecca and home of an annual Fat Bear Contest when people vote for the fattest brown bear. Park rangers estimated this year’s winner, dubbed 747– after the jumbo jet, of course – weighed about 1,400 pounds after gorging on sockeye salmon.
He was last year’s runner-up and the rangers claim he is the biggest bear they’ve ever seen, approaching legendary status. He is so fat his ample tummy got stuck on a rock when he was climbing uphill and he had to back up and find way a way around it. I’ll bet he can’t run at 30 miles an hour. He’ll spend the winter hibernating and losing about a third of his bodyweight before he staggers out to greet the springtime sun and more summer self-indulgence in the hopes of defending his title.
kathrynfclark@verizon.net
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