Re: NNG Watch Out For Bears

If you really understand the motivations of wildlife, they're easy to deal with and avoid for the most part. But yeah, when you live somewhere that a bear can wind up on your back deck, that's a totally different situation than going out in the woods and running across one.
I've encountered black bears a few times growing up in North Florida.
One night on the Yankee Road land navigation course at Ft Benning in 1997 (I was an Army ROTC cadet at Florida State then), I was alone going through the course and taking a short cut down a steep dirt road. On a moonlit night, I could only see the trail, the rest was inky black. Suddenly off to my left, I heard a bunch of hooves galloping in my direction. Deer, at least four, came bounding all around me and in a flash they were gone. With all the BDU-clad people tromping around there, I didn't think much other than how cool that was. I got about 50 feet up the trail when a black bear came out of the blackness from my left and stood there, looking at me from about 20 feet away. Didn't look like a very big bear, but there I was, with no weapon of any kind, and the only way out was a steep hill of Georgia clay. We stared at each other for a moment. No other sounds, so it was alone. I turned to face it, shot my arms up in the air, and screamed every obscenity I could think of. It bolted and I did the same in the opposite direction, checking behind me a few times until I was several hundred yards away at the top of the bluff. I scared the heck of a Ranger School candidate on his night course (I then gave him my extra MRE after convincing him it was no trap from an instructor; I thought he was going to cry) as I broke out into the open, with no concept of stealth.
At the dining out event our senior year, I knew someone would call me out for the bear sighting, as nobody believed I'd had seen one so I had a long time for a zinger (it involved declaring it was really the guy's mother I'd seen) that was so harsh the other guy had to low-crawl to the grog bowl for two gulps.

I was on the back deck of a hotel on the south bank of the Columbia River a few years back with my wife, Out with a camera shooting long night exposures of the bridge at "Bridge of the gods" where you can see both railroad lines very well. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, looked down and saw a cat walking down the path two floor underneath me. Then a split second later I realized I didn't understand the scale of what I was seeing, especially when it passed a empty deck chair and then looked up at me. I was never so thankful for not being on the ground! It was a mountain lion, and a big one. The next morning I went out and took a look at where it'd stood while watching me, that sucker was over 6 feet in length, not including the tail, as I remembered how many segments of the path it spanned in that moment.
My wife has seen a big cat of some kind twice on the back edge of our property, always around Twilight. Probably another Mountain Lion but I've not seen it yet, though I have seen a track among all the deer that come back there at night. I don't go the back of the property except in the middle of the day and when I do, my head is always on a swivel.

-Lee

Flickr photo set of my On30 layout



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/05/2021 02:59PM by et&wnc.