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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsThe occasional downsides of living in a natural paradise.
It's awful nice living in a place where there is wildlife, lots of hiking trails, it's bucolic; I go hiking daily and watch the eagles and bears fish in the fish hatchery. I guess it was inevitable though...I just got treed by a black bear.
For the bear's part, it looked at me like I was an idiot, like wtf are you doing human? I'm way too busy eating this fish with my cub to give a f**k about you. Keep walking backwards and away from us. Oh okay...you want to go up that hemlock...that's okay. Now you stay there until we're done eating.
On the plus side, there's something terrible and beautiful about watching a bear tear trout to shreds from about 15' away.
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NYC_SKP
(68,644 posts)If you know what I mean!
I thought bears could climb trees... I don't know, never got that close to one.
The best advice I've heard it to always hike with at least on person who's slower than you.
Happy for you to be living in a beautiful place!
Actually, bears are generally more scared of us than vice-versa. I see bears often.
The issue here was actually the cub; you never want to be between a bear and its cub, which was what I stumbled into. I was past the mother before I saw her...which is fine because she immediately ran further back from the trail into the trees around the brook and then eyeballed me. I went around the next corner (kind of a slight candy-cane turn about a 1/4 mile up the trail), towards the dirt-ford over the brook that feeds the spillway from the hatchery...and standing on the ford is the cub. Shit. So I can't go back the way I came because of mama bear and I can't ford because of the cub. So I backed slowly away from both bears and scurried up the tree and waited until they left.
Yes, bears can climb trees. The tree is still the best defense in that you only have to defend in one direction, the bear can only attack from below. (They generally won't chase you if they have their cubs with them, their instinct is to protect the cub.) I was wearing hiking boots, jeans and my ankle braces meaning I'm fairly well-armored from below; bears generally don't like being kicked repeatedly in the nose, and I had the high-ground so to speak.
The bears had little interest in me anyways, I was just an annoyance during breakfast.
In_The_Wind
(72,300 posts)IdaBriggs
(10,559 posts)The hunter was very good about staying calm - I would have been freaking out!!!
Yikes!!!
raven mad
(4,940 posts)Here's what's happening at my area of the block - http://www.newsminer.com/news/local_news/more-bear-sightings-reported-in-goldstream-goldhill-areas/article_0b5ffa2a-2dbc-11e4-8b1c-0017a43b2370.html
Big boy, too!
Blackies are everywhere this time of season (berries); be careful!
Chan790
(20,176 posts)we're about as near to each other as I am from Naples, Italy. (About 4300 miles.) Actually, much of our wildlife overlaps in ways that CT wildlife does not overlap with California or Florida or even Ohio...all of which are much closer. Raccoons, opossum, moose, deer, black bears, some wild cats. (Though CT DEEP likes to deny that we have any; we have (few, scarce) mountain lion and bobcats...they stink like rancid carrion and you smell them long before you see them. Everybody in my town has seen a lion at-least once if they've lived here long enough.)
It's actually constant for us with the black bears because I live 1/2-mile from a State of CT Fish Hatchery for stocking trout and salmon into CT waterways. The bears are semi-habituated. They know that smallish shallow brook and channel is home to salmon fry and trout year-round. It's their buffet, they don't stray more than a few miles from it.
raven mad
(4,940 posts)It's the big brownies (our slang term for grizzlies) that we worry about; they're quite aggressive. I got literally sat on by a black bear once - fortunately, I was inside a tent and he wasn't. I'm not sure who screamed louder or ran faster, in opposite directions!
