Re: NNG Watch Out For Bears

heatermason Wrote:
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>
> I have been within less than a dozen feet of alive
> unrestrained adult bears multiple times; the most
> disconcerting is to find it out later. The most
> frightening was discovering myself four feet from
> a cub and having no idea where mother was..... In
> all of these cases I knew the bears were around
> and was prepared mentally and watching, but still
> came unexpectedly close. In all these cases both
> bears and I lived to tell about it with no parties
> harmed. Maybe I was just "lucky"; or maybe like
> in an old Western saying the man born to hang
> never drowns. I did pay attention to local
> information and stayed aware. That should be the
> take-away here. It cannot be said too often.

This is IMHO the key problem with bears in the urban setting; you can easily end up between a sow and her cubs without knowing. One day, my wife pulled into the driveway and started to get out of the car; the neighbor yelled to "Get Back In!!!", as she was stepping into the space between the mother behind our other car and her two cubs out on the front lawn.

If the mother doesn't perceive a specific threat, she'll let the cubs wander a bit, and it can be challenging for a human to perceive both before they run afoul of the mother's line-of-sight.