Living In Bear Country...

1:53 pm - 80 degrees - blue sky...

We live in bear country.  We know and understand the fact that we moved into their territory.  We are living in their natural environment, and we respect that.

Seeing a black bear is an exciting experience, one that happens often up here in the mountains.  We watch them walk through the yard, or walk along the driveway, or hear them crashing through the thick brush.  Once they see us watching them, they turn around and walk or run away.  The awe inspiring experience is over and we all go on about our own business.

The presence of bears has never been a problem or a threat in the eight and a half years that we have owned our property.  They have never tried to get into our trash cans, gotten into our compost bin, bothered our bird feeder, or come sniffing around the barbeque – all of which can attract bears.  The vast majority of bears want to avoid humans.  Encounters with aggressive bears or predatory attacks by bears are very rare, but do occur.

Saturday night we had our first negative encounter with a black bear...and it didn’t end well.

 

Right around 9 pm I heard noises downstairs.  Tony and the kids were asleep so I thought it was our cats or our neighbor’s dog.  I walked downstairs to see what all the ruckus was about and that’s when I came upon a large black bear standing about 10’ feet away.  It took a second for it to register that there was an actual bear right in front of me, then the bear and I took off running in opposite directions – me into the house yelling for Tony and the bear running to the firepit area.  I thought that would have been the end of it, it usually would have been – we both had scared each other off.

As Tony and I were looking out the window in the direction the bear had run off, we were both very surprised to see the him walking in a zig zag pattern back towards the house.  This had never happened before.  We’ve never had a bear so close to house, and we’ve never had a bear run off only to immediately return.  When a bear gets scared off it leaves – it doesn’t come back!

Tony went back downstairs and tried to scare the bear off several more times by trying to run him off, yell at him and fire a warning shot with the loudest gun we own.  Each time the bear would retreat up behind the firepit area, only to turn around and start stalking back towards the house.  This is not normal bear behavior.  The bear was showing aggressive behavior, he kept trying to come back to the house while being hazed off, pacing side to side, the bear had no fear.  Neither of us has ever encountered a bear like this before.  Even though he didn’t want to, in the end, Tony ended up shooting the bear. 

Male black bear, 5'8", about 200 lbs.

Tony called the Department of Fish & Wildlife to report the incident and they came out Sunday morning to pick up the bear.  The DFW officer took a look around, snapped a few pictures of the bear, filled out a report, loaded the bear into the back of their pickup truck and told us that given where we live and the behavior the bear was displaying that we made the right choice.