One Dead Bear & A Blueberry Pie

It's okay, you can look, it's a paper bear. A very dead paper bear but a paper bear nonetheless. Doesn't s/he look ferocious? Yesterday was my annual bear safety/ shotgun training. At least mostly annual. I've given the bear training myself more times then I can count and I try not to fall asleep when someone else gives it but the afternoon shotgun session is always worth being outside for a sunny spring day. That despite my exceedingly bruised shoulder from the shotgun (but see that shot right through the heart - that's mine). Plus I got blueberry pie out of it.


Let me just say, for the record, that despite my many years in bear country and my many encounters only 1 of them ever involved a charge and I emptied a can of Bear Spray in that grizzly's face and it stopped. Granted, it stopped about 1 foot in front of me and my quivering fieldworker who I was holding down with my other hand (he thought he should run! Never, ever run from a bear!), but he stopped. For the most part I won't be taking a shotgun with me but relying on good old pepper spray (I have an old post on it here, if you want more details). There are two occasions I prefer to have a gun though: 1)when I'm working on a salmon stream - let's face it, this is pretty much a grizzly bear buffet and they may think that this little naked (relative to a bear) bear needs a lesson in who gets the best fishing holes and 2) when I'm working in an area where I know the bears are not only well adapted to humans but to their food (this is a particular problem in bear-baiting areas - don't get me started).

Here's some fun bear-human facts to entertain you:

-more people get killed by pet dogs then bears
-in Alaska, more people get killed by moose then bears
-bears have never attacked a group of 4 or more if those people stand as a group (cowering behind your partner doesn't count - you've got to stand shoulder to shoulder)
-bears are a lot like dogs in their body language
-bear bells mean absolutely nothing to bears since they never evolved with a sound similar. However, pick up a stick & snap it up in little pieces and they will hear it and take good heed.
-I'm way more scared of humans then bears (but this fact may be more about me then bears)

This picture is not mine - I don't know who to credit. I've been told it's of a local bear but there are a few tree species in the photo that make me suspicious of that. As you can tell though, bears will go to great length for food!

Do me a favor, if you live in bear country, take down your bird seed already! And don't put it up again until it looks like winter!

Bears

Today was a long morning at work. I took my lunch break several hours too late and went for a much needed bicycle ride. At first I was pedaling furiously, lost in the thunder clouds in my own mind, taking no notice of the lovely autumn day, the wind, and the colors on the hillside when I went around a bend and there, just a few feet off the road sat a beautiful black bear munching on service berries. Suddenly everything was restored in the world and the rest of my ride I could feel the thunder clouds in my head slipping away even as they gathered on the horizon of the land.

The Bear Went Over the Moutain

I was singing this song on my hike the other evening when lo and behold I ran into a black bear going over the mountain. It's a bit of an odd coincidence. Now, technically, I was singing this song for the benefit of this bear and it's brethren, the better not to sneak up on them, but still. I was singing this particular song not because it's a good song or because I had an enthusiastic child along but because I was tired of my own prattle of out-loud thoughts and because the repetitive songs learned in childhood are a good way to keep up the noise level and keep thinking because I don't have to work at remembering the lyrics. (Yellow Owl's Clover [Orthocarpus luteus] pictured to the lower right)

So why was this bear going over the mountain? As far as I can tell s/he climbed the mountain because the view made it a perfect place for a latrine. Clearly it had been in use as such for some years as the piles of aged to new feces would attest. And once s/he was there, why not go down the other side? After all, there is a good salmon stream down there and some yummy watermelon & salmonberries along the way. Of course, maybe s/he was going to the other side but the exertion of mountain climbing prompted other bodily functions, we'll never know for sure.

Bear Spray

So before I went on my weekend hike I decided it was about time I checked the expiration date on my bear spray. But there was a problem. Due to the fact that, when I have to fly to a field site the bear spray gets duct taped to the wing strut of the small plane (in order to prevent the chaos that would occur should it accidentally go off in the plane), there is no longer a label on any three of my bottles of bear spray. The labels have been peeled off with the duct tape. Hmmm. Well, I think I’m going to retire them all as “practice bottles” and get new ones because I’m thinking they’re at least 3 years old.

Did you know that in Canada this spray is called Bear Spray and in the US it is called pepper spray and that it is illegal to take pepper spray to Canada or bear spray to the US and it’s the exact same thing? I find this odd and it’s a pain in the rear if you are doing fieldwork across borders. Oh, and that pocket on Carhardt pants that is meant for your carpenter tools? It makes a great bear spray pocket. (See pic to right.)

Some of you may be familiar with a little pepper spray which can be attached to your key chain or something to be used to defend yourself against humans. Mine is about 20 times the size of that little spray and I usually use it against animals. But if I had to use it against a human it would probably knock them out cold while I made my get away. Which is comforting since some of the place I go I'm more suspicious about any other humans I would run into then I am animals and let's face it, animals are more predicatable. If you know what you're looking for they won't lie to you about how they're feeling about your presence.

And for those of you who will read this and then ask me what they should do if they see a black or grizzly (brown) bear may I recommend the DVD Staying Safe in Bear Country: A Behavior-Based Approach to Reducing Risk? This DVD is put together by the International Association for Bear Research and Management, in other words: bear scientists, and is excellent. I myself watch it every spring and use it in my bear safety training classes that I teach for seasonal employees new to bear country. I mention it because of a conversation I had with a police officer in Colorado who had just learned the "Whoa Bear!" shout and was talking about it like it was a new discovery & I realized that this information is not as available to the bear encountering public as much as I would like it to be. I promptly went out and purchased a copy as a gift for all of my backpacking friends.