A Bear Visit

The Lady of the House had a very interesting experience while I was at work yesterday with a visiting bear. When I say visiting, I mean opening the trash can, and trying to get what little food there is in our trash.

Before I get to that I'm going to touch on our GoFundMe. We finally have a solid estimate on the furnace replacement. It is going to come to $10,550, and we have to pay half up front for them to get started. To help us out my father is offering donation matching dollar for dollar. Right now if you can help, your donation will count double.

That out there, let's get back to the bear, and the Lady of the House.

For those of you who know bears, this is a very small bear, probably a yearling. It also looks very much malnourished. Probably due to the need for food, this bear was a bit daring. The Lady of the House shouted and growled which got it moving away initially.

Unfortunately it promptly came back around. Usually this is behavior of a Very human habituated bear, though in this case I could very easily see this being a bear that is so hungry that it is more difficult to deter. It probably really needs the food. Because of that situation it needed to be scared and scared badly.

Obviously one still has to be careful, even a bear this small could do a lot of damage if provoked, though it is unlikely to. Black bears tend to prefer to avoid confrontation. This one was no different. When the Lady of the House pushed to try to drive it off, it promptly moved out of range from her. Again though, instead of running the way a bear usually would when confronted by a lot of noise, and a big predator, it just went to the woods line.

Important to know, humans are big predators to most animals. Many predators even recognize humans as large and dangerous though we are fairly squishy because we are tall, and have forward facing eyes.

Once at the woods line, instead of continuing to move off, it just, as you can see, sat down almost like a dog. His canniness with humans was concerning, because it would indicate that he just isn't scared of people at all. That would mean that this bear is likely to come back and be a problem over and over. The cure for something like that is a real scare. The trick of course is how to really scare such a bear.

The Lady of the House tried doing a false charge or two, which often does scare off a bear as they tend to not want to be aggressively approached. This sort of bear while problematic isn't a threat to human life yet. The problem with a bear like this not getting scared badly is that it in the future will be a problem and have trouble co-existing with humans. The problem here is, it's reaction to the false charges and more yelling and noise making was just to circle the property, going to the fire pit area.

This incident made us Very happy to have a dog, because our final tool for bear scaring since I don't yet have pepper rounds for the shotgun is the dog. You know what, the dog is Very effective, and really enjoys this part of his job around the house. A good side benefit, the dog gets some much needed exercise. We don't go to the dog as a good option because 1: he could hurt the bear, and 2: the bear could hurt him. Once we get the bear starting to move away, letting the dog go after the bear and scare it into a tree is a good way to cement that this area isn't a good place to be. This bear behaved oddly again, usually the bear goes up a tree quickly, this time the dog chased the bear for some distance before coming back tired and happy. We hope that did enough to scare the bear off permanently, hopefully from all humans, not just us.

Edited to add: The Lady of The House gives this note: Just for the record, I would never have released the dog if I thought that either would get hurt, I couldn't leave the area because my son was still napping. Animal does not come when called, and I know my dog Very well. He is all bark, and has a very good recall. Never assume your dog would do the same.

TLDR: Call animal control if it is at all an option.