Bear

:date: 2025-06-15 20:44 :tags:

About five days ago Mya started barking like crazy in the middle of the night. In the morning we found our bird feeder had been knocked over.

Four days ago we spotted a fox hanging around the bird feeder (which, you know, attracts fox food).

Three days ago we got a community email that a bear had been sighted. This included two photos, one of which was taken one property over from us.

This morning at about 0600 Mya and I both heard something outside. I jumped up and was able to take some photos of the cause. A bear!

I've seen quite a few brown bears in Canada and California and, yes, they're bigger, but this visiting black bear impressed me with his size. He was a big animal!

Just look at that bird feeder pole. That is a steel pipe and the bear just broke it in half! Sorry, birds, looks like you're not getting fed any more.

You also hear about how fast bears are but I've never personally seen one running quickly. (I personally have run and biked quickly away from them!) This one did give us a demonstration by running across our forest and, ya, as someone who is pretty experienced at moving through the forest quickly, this bear was fast. There's no way I could match its speed on snow skis under my own power. If I had a decent enough head start, out-running one on rollerskis could be possible only if the bear tired after 100m or so. In my best cycling shape, I do think on a bike on pavement I could have outrun this bear's demonstrated running speed. But I'm not in my best cycling shape. And maybe the bear wasn't at top speed. I do think about these things for obvious reasons. Now I can hope about these things too  —  hope it doesn't ever become an issue.

Skiing in the winter I saw wolf tracks all the time in the deep middle of nowhere. But I never worried too much about them since the tracks were always alone. (Here's a dashcam clip of a wolf on our property.) But I did often worry about bears. You may think you're safe when they're presumably hibernating, but I've heard of backcountry skiers accidentally skiing into/on their dens and waking them up. I always keep that in mind.