Yikes. My sister had a sign over her door in Tolkitna Alaska the stated" Beyond this door , you are entering the food chain".

I do lots of things that make me very cognizant of being alone out in the universe. I can commiserate. That cell phone is a godsend as long as there is a signal. Out west , it is not very dependable away from towns. Even where I live 30 miles from Austin , the coverage becomes moth-eaten. Usually the bears of the East do not have a bur up there @sses the way western bears have. New Hampshire bears would amble across the yard routinely and pay no mind. They were well fed buggers. I still gave them plenty of room and if there were babes, I skiddadled quickly and quietly.

My take on black bears-which is the only kind I have any experience with-is that yes, they mostly would prefer not to deal with us humans. But....and this is a big but...if you should be so unlucky as to get between a sow and her cubs, or any black bear and its favorite berry patch, things could get very bad very quickly. Unlike grizzlies, brown bears, etc. black bears are unimpressed with somebody playing dead. They will still eat you!

I am told too that even in Alaska, where 3 or 4 bear species exist, it is the black bears which are responsible for nearly all of the cabin break-ins, etc.

Haha...too funny. I don't think we give animals enough credit sometimes for their intelligence and problem-solving abilities!

It is at least mildly ironic that I'd come up close to a big black bear 1000 miles from home, when up at our land, the place is crawling with bears, but we never see them up there, only their droppings and other evidence. For such big guys, they're pretty sneaky.

Everything in Alaska is bigger and meaner. Even their crows and ravens. They are so large they look like another species from the ones down south.

The Bears have been moving east from West Texas and one has been seen in San Antonio proper. A friend who used to run the wild forest reserves in SA had a mom and a baby on a trail and they had to close the park for a few days. That is what they do for mountain lions also and they have had many sitings in the city. They brought in a guy from California for advise on how to deal with the growing population. What is really weird is that "officially" there are only mountain lions in the Big Bend in the state of Texas, because that is where there is an active study of them . The rest of all the reports and sitings are considered "Urban Legend". So I am being visited by an urban Legend.

We went through quite a few years of legend status for the existence of mountain lions here in this state too. The advent of trail cameras everywhere has cleared up that misconception! And too, the big cats might have largely moved back into this state only relatively recently. Nobody knows.

In November 1990 we had one, Tom. It was early evening, but dark and I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink, window right in front of me. There were Malibu lights staggered down the sides of the tiered walkway from the parking spot up by the garage. I remarked how unusual it was that a deer was walking right down those steps, and my 15-year-old stepson (with sharper eyes than I) came over and looked out too. He said "that's not a deer, it looks like a big cat." I was excited because I've never had a good look at a bobcat, and we wanted to really see it, so I held the big lantern type flashlight and Jay opened the door. Holy sh--. It was a cougar, broadside to us, 20 or feet away from the house and us. One surprised snarl and it was gone. Thrilling, and if I had been alone no one would have believed me.

So it happens. Or happened. Who knows, maybe it was an unreported escapee or possibly someone released a "pet" that wasn't so cute anymore.

Black bear mommas will generally abandon their cubs and run away from humans. That's what I've read anyway. I'm not going to test it, however, I have surprised a mother black bear with cubs and they all climbed a red pine together, so who knows.

Are Black Bears the Most Protective Animal Mother?

Black bears may be the most common in North America, but do they provide the best example of a protective animal mother? Much research has been done on this topic over the years, and biologist Stephen Herrero summarized many of the results in his book, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. In his book, Herrero discusses Al Erickson’s pioneer research of black bear mothers and cubs, which was done in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Erickson captured 96 black bear cubs, and found that the mother bears did not exhibit the strong maternal instinct that one would expect from an animal mother. Instead, the mother bears would often abandon their cubs during an impending threat.

Additional research was conducted by Lynn Rogers, which served to further corroborate Erickson’s results. Rogers found that out of the eighteen bear cubs that were captured in the presence of their mothers, none of their mothers attacked. Most of the time, the animal mother took cover and hid under tree brush. To date, there is no evidence of a black bear ever defending their cubs by killing an aggressor. Instead, mother bears are much more likely to run away or hide when faced with a possible human attack.

Black Bear Mommas

Like you, I don't intend to directly test this bit of info!

Sounds like Cam Newton with a loose football.

My sister is a radio reporter up in Alaska and she does bear attack duty covering those nasty run ins. Not the reporting she likes to do.

Yet another thing to be grateful for - the paucity of native (and non-native) fauna in the UK. The risk of danger, even from an enraged badger, is so unlikely as to be non-existent ...our greatest risk lies in ticks and the chance of deer in the headlights. It has, however, taken 4 decades of training for this bee and wasp phobic gardener to overcome crippling anxiety - my children like to regale friends with many tales of walking a traumatised mother home with a t-shirt pulled over her head (if you can't see it, it isn't there, right?)

Funny. My summer crew-a whopping two college-age people-were tried and true, lasting for a full four years. I'm sorry to have to replace them this spring. But amazingly, to me anyway, is that one of them never overcame her irrational fear of bees and any other flying insect for that matter. These people work in flower beds all day, every day! I could come up to them to talk about some aspect of their work, and she would be off in the distance somewhere trying to escape a bee. I could have them crawling on my arms as we talked-none of which made the slightest impression-she remained horrified at the mere existence of these creatures. I could never figure that one out.

I've only ever been stung when a bee or wasp somehow gets trapped under my sleeve or shirt collar. Otherwise, like I say, they can crawl around on my skin...there's no issue.

Grief - by 'overcome', I mean not fling the 18month old infant to the ground when one landed on him...or run away from 8year old daughter who was in the process of actually being stung. I can work alongside a bee or wasp...as long as I have my eye on it at all times...but would avoid being trapped in the greenhouse with one. However, I consider this a major success since, as a child, I couldn't actually touch a page in a book which had a drawing of a bee on it. 'Crawling around on my skin' is NEVER going to happen.

I am, however, perfectly OK with spiders....and possibly bears (at a distance)

Touche'!

Grief - by 'overcome', I mean not fling the 18month old infant to the ground when one landed on him...or run away from 8year old daughter who was in the process of actually being stung.

Heheheh. Actually, my younger sis would do that. "Do what you will with the child, but leave me alone!" She's bee-sterical.

We have lions, bears, hawks, aligator lizards, owls, racoons, and coyote in the city. Lions and bears are my favorites.

A koala bear came up missing at the new outdoor Los Angeles zoo display and a pregnant mountain lion was caught on video camera leaving the scene. The news said they couldn't prove she did it, but the zoo decided to enclose the koala exhibit.

Its very rare to see a mountain lion. They are protected. Lions travel with the deer and thats the reason Los Angeles doesn't have deer overpopulation like the rest of the nation.

Video cameras catch bears swimming in peoples pools. Coyote howling at night. Hawks population is coming back as the tiny dog population increases.

I have seen lion paw prints within 25' from my house. The deer were a bit more scarce around then. I followed the tracks and saw them stretch out in distance of a run and in-between there were tiny deer hoof prints of the doomed.. I also found tracks an a spot where there is trees and a raised spot by a water tank that had been pressed down in my front field. I have heard them snarl in the gorge in back. That made my hair on my arms rise involuntarily. WE still have way to many deer and not enough ML to dent their population. People like to feed the deer. They like them as lawn ornaments. They don't seem to like plants in their yard.

That feeding of deer is so, so very dumb. How do folks get to the point that they think they are "helping" the situation when feeding wild animals, the survival of which-at least as a species-absolutely cannot depend on handouts?

In this state-since the repooplican takeover of state govt.-all wise management of natural resources, including deer, has been tossed into the fire (where they are also busy burning the books!) and what a surprise....as all efforts to halt chronic wasting disease-a serious disease of deer which apparently started out west but which traveled to Wisconsin via these ridiculous "deer farms", where many deer are together in crowded conditions, eating together, etc. have been halted, what a surprise! Now, following last fall's deer gun season, which is big business in a place like this, it is turning out that CWD is showing up all over the state, in something like 10% of animals tested. Good going guys! Bury your heads in the sand...maybe all problems will just go away!

I'm thinking my venison-eating days may be over. Spongy brain disease, anyone?