If you haven’t guessed by now, I live “out in the woods”. To some people it is the boonies since it takes 20+ minutes to get to a grocery store. Being in the boonies has some great things going for it, reasonably quite, no houses close by, so you don’t have neighbors looking in your windows and you have lots of visitors — of the wild type.

In my last post I talked about a bear visitor. Since then we’ve had a few skunks (mom is thankful that us pups didn’t encounter those), rabbits, squirrels and a flock of baby turkeys. And now the bears have returned.

A few weeks ago we decided to take a walk around the “trail” that sort of goes through our part of the neighborhood. Not too long into the walk we heard a fairly loud noise. Mom takes a look around and spots a bear running away from us. Well, that put an end to the walk – the peeps decided we needed to turn around and go back the way we came from. Our next walk ended abruptly as well due to a skunk sitting on the edge of our road 😦

Now the bears are back around our house again. The most recent one spotted looks like this year’s cub, while the photo we shared in our last post looked more like a last year cub. Of course one must assume when a baby bear is around, momma is probably close by. Here’s a photo of what we think is momma bear.

And here’s a couple of screen captures of baby bear that were caught on security cameras. (If mom would upgrade my blog subscription, I would be able to upload the actual videos )This cub looks smaller than the one in my previous post – thus we are thinking it was born early this year.

The peeps figure as long as the bears aren’t bothering anything, then there is no reason to try to scare them away. They are very careful with trash, etc. and we have tons of natural food sources in the woods that the bears would normally consume, so we are hoping all continues to stay peaceful.

The month of May ended on a soggy note – lots of rain! But between the rain showers we did have some excitement…. we had a visitor. A visitor that the peeps don’t think us pups had ever seen before – maybe we had smelled it, but never seen it. It went down like this:

One evening the peeps were killing time (aka relaxing) by watching television. Mom’s preferred spot on the couch has a partial view out the window that us pups love to put our front paws in and survey our kingdom. This particular evening mom spotted something moving. To get Pop’s attention she said this, “bear, bear BEAR!” and points out of window. Of course this got the man going “what? WHAT!?” as he ran to take a look.

And sure enough, outside the window was a young bear, most likely a yearling. At this point, us pups had no interest in what had the humans so excited. If it didn’t involve a treat or cookie, I was not getting up off of my bed. The peeps watched it meander around and it got close enough to the side of the house that they lost sight of it. A few minutes later they decide to go out on the deck to see if they could locate it again.

Now mind you, Mom has worked with a Black Bear rescue/rehabilitation group and she had a niggling suspicion as to where that bear might be. See, Mom had been lazy and failed to take down the bird feeders that are suspended from our deck rails, despite her knowing that they can be very tempting to bears this time of year. With this in mind, and knowing the bear is probably looking for food, those bird feeders could very well be where the bear was heading.

So the peeps open up the door & walk out on the deck. Pop is clueless and isn’t really paying attention. He’s busy walking over to the side of the deck where he last seen the bear. Mom was on alert and immediately started clapping her hands really loud. Pop could not understand why she was doing this… until he actually looked where he was heading. The bear had climbed the deck post (approximately 14 feet from the ground) and was peering over the top rail. The clapping startled the bear and it went back down the post.

All this noise made us pup curious and out the deck door we went. By this time the bear had climbed a short way up a nearby tree. Us hounds commenced to raising holy heck! Talking about barking, howling, yowling, yipping – you name it, we were making it. We scared that poor bear down the tree and back into the woods. It took us the better part of an hour to settle down. Never in our lives had we seen such a creature!

Several lessons were learned that day, 1) bring the bird feeders in at the time of year you should, 2) Pop needs to start paying attention to his environment and lastly 3) three dogs of assorted sizes can make enough noise to raise the dead! Or in this scare to scare away a bear!

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