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BirdDogDad

BirdDogDad

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I am not an accomplished wildlife photographer like so many within this forum, but I thought some of you might enjoy seeing a visitor I had a couple of hours ago. Taken from my deck. New D850, Nikon 200-500. He (or she) had just spotted my wife's bird feeder.

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Grumpy said:
Looks like a pretty good sized animal. How big would you guess it is?
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I'm guessing it could be close to 400 pounds, which is a good-sized bear by Colorado black bear standards. Certainly over 300 pounds. Where I live we see more brown, cinnamon, even blonde bears than pure black, although all are "black" bears. And there are a lot of them. Below another photo of a big mama and her cub I took a few years ago, also from my deck.
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You may not be an accomplished wildlife photographer, but you've gotten two really great photographs. We have a lot of black bears here, but any color other than black is really uncommon. The bear in the first photo is probably about 350 pounds -- black bears have a lot of hair and many people overestimate their weight. Years ago Pennsylvania had a minimum weight of 100 pounds for a legal bear during hunting season. I remember a hunter bringing a 36 pound cub to a check station -- he'd shot it thinking it was a legal bear.
 
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Woody Meristem said:
You may not be an accomplished wildlife photographer, but you've gotten two really great photographs. We have a lot of black bears here, but any color other than black is really uncommon. The bear in the first photo is probably about 350 pounds -- black bears have a lot of hair and many people overestimate their weight. Years ago Pennsylvania had a minimum weight of 100 pounds for a legal bear during hunting season. I remember a hunter bringing a 36 pound cub to a check station -- he'd shot it thinking it was a legal bear.
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Thanks, Woody. This forum is helping me become more accomplished, which I greatly appreciate. I agree with your size assessment on the first bear. 400 pounds is as big as a black bear gets in Colorado, and you don't see many that size. I'm sure the 36-pound "trophy" cost the hunter an expensive lesson. I've done a fair amount of hunting myself, and will admit that it is very difficult to judge the size of a bear in the field, especially for the inexperienced. They all look big. When you've seen enough of them, it becomes easier to recognize a really big boar. Some more bruin pix below, all taken from my deck. The little cub, in the last (and best) shot, climbed up onto my deck to see what I was doing. After grabbing a couple of shots from 10 feet away, I encouraged it to go back to Mama.

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Great captures! Going in your backyard must be sometimes a little stressful! Mother reddish and cubs very black; some black bears, I suppose, take the brown color when they are older?
 
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Thanks to all for the kind comments. Cristobal, the varying colors of our bruins are known as "color phase" bears. While all considered normal black bears, their actual colors vary widely. The young ones might change in color a bit, bit not very much. It is odd that in some areas, such as where I live, most of the bears exhibit colors other than black; in Canada, however, from what I've seen most of them are solid black and a different color is a rarity. Just a matter of genetics, I guess.

Abinoone, yes, it is cool--most of the time--to see these magnificent creatures up close, but more than once I've been out playing with my dogs when a big bear comes ambling through, and we have to high-tail it indoors. My dogs think they are brave, and bark ferociously, but they don't hesitate to follow me into the house. Our bears are usually nocturnal, so this isn't a common problem. Every so often, though, a hungry one decides to go on the prowl in the daytime. We will also see them in daylight when they get overcrowded. A big male boar has a sizeable territory he considers his own, and won't tolerate a younger bear moving in. A few years ago, during one of our bad forest fires (that spared our house by only a few miles), we were seeing bears at all hours. The fire, by virtue of burning thousands of acres, had driven many bears out of their normal home ranges and they were desperate for food and safety. We would see the biggest bears after dark, younger ones in morning and afternoon, and the smallest, youngest ones in the middle of the day. Noontime was the only time of day the small ones could avoid the senior bears, who would try to kill the younger ones if they found them. Sad, but that is Mother Nature.
 
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That first photo is a beauty. Stephen Herrero is the acknowledged North American expert on bear attacks. In this video (https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000000812441/stephen-herrero-on-black-bear-attacks.html) he describes the most dangerous black bears, and they're not females with cubs. Of the roughly 250 encounters I've had with black bears, only two gave me cause for concern and neither was a female with cubs -- one had been fed at a hunting club and the other had either been fed or was raiding bird feeders.
 
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Woody Meristem said:
That first photo is a beauty. Stephen Herrero is the acknowledged North American expert on bear attacks. In this video (https://www.nytimes.com/video/science/100000000812441/stephen-herrero-on-black-bear-attacks.html) he describes the most dangerous black bears, and they're not females with cubs. Of the roughly 250 encounters I've had with black bears, only two gave me cause for concern and neither was a female with cubs -- one had been fed at a hunting club and the other had either been fed or was raiding bird feeders.
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Woody, I watched Mr. Herrero's presentation, and it dispels everything I thought I knew about black bears, and I thought I knew a lot. Absolutely fascinating, and I greatly appreciate your sharing this. On a couple of occasions I have blundered into black bears after dark, to be met with major huffing and chuffing and bluff charges. I am certain that in those instances, they were females with cubs. It required a change of underwear, but fortunately, no more serious damage resulted. Now I know why. Even though I live in a semi-rural area, it is becoming more and more populated, yet fortunately our bears remain wild and generally afraid of human beings. There are exceptions, usually caused by idiots that feed them, or leave their doors wide open on a warm evening while cooking. We have several bear "break-ins" like this every year in my area. Many bears have learned how to break into cars to get the fast-food left inside. Sadly, the bears are not to blame, but they are invariably caught and destroyed by Colorado Parks & Wildlife, which has no other choice. The wildlife people don't enjoy that part of their job.

We have so many bears living near us that over the years I have been able to distinguish and recognize several individuals. Like dogs, each has a different personality. As a rule I leave them alone, remove any culinary tempations, simply enjoy their antics and, if lucky, try to grab a couple of photos before they move on. We've had a couple, though, that exhibited increasingly bold behavior over time, including parading across our deck and pressing their noses to our patio door. Some of these would visit several times a day. When that happens, I try to re-instill some fear in them with yelling, posturing and, if necessary, the application of a "bear bomb" as recommended by our wildlife agency--an empty soda can half full of small stones that makes a helluva racket when shaken and, when all else fails, is thrown at the bear. Kind of funny, actually.

The most frustrating thing to me--and I am editorializing here--are the people that move to the mountains from some pollution-choked city to "escape," but are terrified at their first sight of a wandering bear and call Parks & Wildlife demanding that they "do something" about the mean old bears that strike fear into their ignorant citified hearts. This is often a death sentence for a bear. I'd be much happier if Parks & Wildlife could "do something" about the morons that can't grasp that the bears were here first, and that we're the ones intruding on them, not vice versa. If they can't handle bears, go back to the city where it is obviously much safer.

Several years ago I was on a backpacking trip with one other fellow deep into the back country of British Columbia, setting up camp after canoeing many miles from civilization. A black bear raided our camp two days in a row, while we were out hiking during the day. I've heard that most mammals can't distinguish color, but I've seen too many exceptions to this. The bear that raided our camp intensely disliked anything orange. It shredded my sleeping bag (orange), and appeared to have jumped into the air and done a belly flop on top of our tent fly (orange), collapsing the tent. Anything in camp that was reddish or orange was thoroughly mutilated. Lest anything think we were careless with our food, that was not the case. Nothing edible was left out, and most of our provisions consisted of canned food, which we thought was safe. Not the case. The bear would grab a can, take it about 100 yards away, puncture it with its teeth, and drain any tasty liquids from the can it could get.

My friend and I found all of our canned goods equally distributed in a perfect 100-yard radius surrounding our camp. We survived for the next several days eating from the cans that the bear had punctured. At least he left us something.

We set up an alarm system by stringing empty cans on a rope around camp, and on the third day, we hid in the trees near camp and waited all day for the thief to show up again. It never did.

Magnificent and intelligent creatures, they are. It is good for arrogant humans to occasionally encounter a wild beast twice their size that could easily do them in if it chose to. Instills some much-needed humility. We could take a lesson from the fact that in almost every case, the beast chooses to simply walk away.

Apologies for the rambling, and straying from the topic of photography--I get worked up about the travesties human beings needlessly inflict upon wildlife. And this comes from a life-long hunter.

One last bruin pic, illustrating how quickly "our" bears learn how to pull a cord, yank a bird feeder over a branch, and eat everything in it. That's why all our bird feeders come inside at night.

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Tom,
You have many very nice images. That first image has an impressively large bear in it. I love the lone cub shot. I think that one would be hanging on my wall. Nice work and lucky you to have these visitors to photograph.
 
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BirdDogDad said:
Thanks, Woody. This forum is helping me become more accomplished, which I greatly appreciate. I agree with your size assessment on the first bear. 400 pounds is as big as a black bear gets in Colorado, and you don't see many that size. I'm sure the 36-pound "trophy" cost the hunter an expensive lesson. I've done a fair amount of hunting myself, and will admit that it is very difficult to judge the size of a bear in the field, especially for the inexperienced. They all look big. When you've seen enough of them, it becomes easier to recognize a really big boar. Some more bruin pix below, all taken from my deck. The little cub, in the last (and best) shot, climbed up onto my deck to see what I was doing. After grabbing a couple of shots from 10 feet away, I encouraged it to go back to Mama.

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Beautiful series Tom!👍👍
 
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Unlike Colorado, Pennsylvania usually relocates bears that get into trouble with humans, even a few that have clobbered a person. Here it's illegal to feed bears and some people have been cited for feeding. The few recent "attacks" here have been where someone lets a yappy little dog out and the dog takes after a female bear with cubs who reciprocates by going after the dog. At that point "Fluffy" runs back to its owner who tries to defend the dog -- you can guess what happens then. A recent video of a young woman going after a bear that was defending its cubs from her dogs is a classic example.

We take our feeders in at night, but a neighbor did what I recommended and put a one strand electric fence around the tree where his feeders hang and hung some strips of uncooked bacon on the wire. He said the bawling and crashing was impressive and the bears haven't been back.
 
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BirdDogDad said:
Thanks, Woody. This forum is helping me become more accomplished, which I greatly appreciate. I agree with your size assessment on the first bear. 400 pounds is as big as a black bear gets in Colorado, and you don't see many that size. I'm sure the 36-pound "trophy" cost the hunter an expensive lesson. I've done a fair amount of hunting myself, and will admit that it is very difficult to judge the size of a bear in the field, especially for the inexperienced. They all look big. When you've seen enough of them, it becomes easier to recognize a really big boar. Some more bruin pix below, all taken from my deck. The little cub, in the last (and best) shot, climbed up onto my deck to see what I was doing. After grabbing a couple of shots from 10 feet away, I encouraged it to go back to Mama.

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All nice but, these are the best. Congratulation.
 
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