Enjoy Seeing Bears !

 

Bear pictured above is from a different swamp. 

Interesting bear observation while hiking to check trail cameras last weekend. As I rounded a corner on a fire road, adjacent to a small beaver pond, a bear crossed the road and started foraging the shoreline. Wind direction was in my favor, and I went undetected.  At the same time the resident beaver wanted the bear to move on and repeatedly slapped its tail on the waters surface . This in turn, sent what appeared to be a small cub running through the shadows of the underbrush. The bear had no tolerance for the noisy beaver and charged the water splashing which sent the beaver under water. All went quiet. The bear foraged the shoreline then headed down stream out of sight ,I continued hiking reliving the sequence of events that had just occurred and something wasn’t adding up. The bear was small , I’m estimating three years old. Much to young to be tugging along a cub. But I know what I saw, or did I? The event changed my TC card check route and I headed back to the beaver pond. I wanted to see if there was any evidence left behind of the bear or its cub. The substrate was loose and watery, like pea soup. I did find two partial tracks of the bear and what appeared to be raccoon tracks along the area where I saw the cub. CONCLUSION : Things aren’t often what they appear. It would have been easier just to continue hiking and tell the story that I saw a sow and a cub . I’m glad I went back and investigated the scene. Theirs a slim possibility that there was a bear cub, but the probability is that the raccoon was at the beaver pond prior to the bear crossing the cart road and then ran off after all the commotion started.

Jim