bear sighting during logging

[B.C.C. Lapp]

I see bears on a fairly regular basis.   I get them in my yard, on my porch where they knock over my grill and raid my bird feeders.    March and April is always the worst for that.  So far the record is 5 different bears in one day.  I see bears in the woods at work now and then as well.   

Except for the damage they occasionally do we enjoy them and they are harmless.   My grandmother once went after one with a broom. But then she was nobody to mess with.

But these are black bears.   Not browns or grizzlies.   Ive no experience with those kinds and I don't want any.   

[barbender]

 Yeah you can usually run a black bear off with just a shout, or just making yourself visible. I'd never try that with a grizzly😬

 My Grandma wasn't to be trifled with either, she killed a badger with a broom when it made the mistake of getting into her precious chickens😳😂

 Unfortunately, sometimes when we are cutting blowdown in the winter, we inadvertently roll a bear out that has set up quarters under a blowdown. It about gives the harvester operator a heart attack (not to mention the poor bear) when they grab on to the stem of the tree and a bear comes blowing out through the snow! 

 It is surprising, a lot of the dens we've found the bears aren't even fully covered, just a little hollow under a tree. Not at all a "den" like a small cave that I would expect.

 I love bears, they remind me of a big dopey black lab🤷

[ppine]

Lots of people seem to discount black bears.  I would not do that.  They have equipment and they are really smart.  A small percentage of them are predatory on humans. 

I worked on a project in SE Alaska for two years.  We were on salmon streams a lot of the time.  We saw bears every day, sometimes all day.  The enormous coastal brown bears never gave me any problems.  I gave them room.  They were well fed.  

The black bears were a different story.  Most of them had never seen humans before.  They were very curious.  Some of them followed us around for hours.  They would always show up behind us. It was unnerving because we were working on gauging streams and collecting water quality data a lot of the time.  We had our heads down but had to look up and maintain situational awareness.  The country was thick with 150 inches.  A lot of the encounters were at around 40-50 yards sometimes less.  I always carried a rifle but it could be leaning against a tree.  Take all bears seriously even 200 pound black bears. 

[peakbagger]

When I worked for a mill owned by the remnants of Fraser Papers as it got stripped by Brookfield, the corporate dictate was any major injury that happened in the company had to be brought up in safety meetings around the company so that everyone could discuss and learn what to do to prevent it from happening again. One week the topic was an employee up in Canada that had been cruising timber in a remote area and killed and partially eaten by a black bear. It wasn't really applicable to us in the mills in Maine, but our facility had a large landfill used to dispose of mostly pulp and paper sludge with small mix of local municipal waste. The person in charge of the landfill was worried that someone might get hit by a bullet, so he banned hunting from the large piece of property. The bears displaced by a nearby local landfill that closed when the new landfill went into operation found their way to the new one and with no hunting started to work the piles. They would hang out in the woods and when they saw a regular trash truck they would run out and tear into the trash but left the sludge alone. Off hours they would take over the pile digging it up. The operators at the landfill who moved stuff around with various equipment got very careful about getting into an out of the equipment. There were a couple of close calls. They then started leaving a hole in the sludge piles and when the municipal trucks dumped the load they would quickly cover it with sludge. The bears did not like that and they started to climb trying to get in the cabs at the operators on the equipment while the operators were covering the piles. They eventually bought the operators all bear spray for the cabs and invited hunters to set up bait stations around the landfill. 

A few years later the mill shut down for several months due to the owner going bankrupt. They still were accepting municipal at the landfill as there was no other place to take it. The salary folks who were out of work if they wanted to, could do guard duty during the shutdown of the mills which entailed driving around the mills every hour stopping at various locations and turning watchman keys installed at those locations in a watchclock. One of those stops was the landfill that was near the top of nearby mountain on a mile long dead end road. When we drove up the road to the landfill especially at night, there were bears everywhere and zero lighting. It was creepy and at the time no cell coverage. In general, it was creepy driving around 100 plus acres of shutdown buildings and I finally decided to go find something else to do. They did eventually reopen under a new owner for a couple of years but the mills are now long gone but the landfill remains and from what I hear the bears are still major issue as its now mostly municipal with some construction debris mixed in. 

[barbender]

I don't mean to suggest that black bears aren't dangerous. But in my area, they are hunted pretty heavily and every time I've ever had an encounter with them, they are hightailing it out of there.

[peakbagger]

They get hunted in NH and Maine and the ones in the woods usually run when they see someone. The dangerous ones are the human habituated ones that are being actively fed of fed from folks who do not keep food sources protected. Those bears go right through neighborhoods and train their cubs and many of the local welcome it. Some eventually just start ignoring people and start breaking into places if they are hungry. Most of the time its traced to someone in the area was actively feeding them because they were "so cute" and then the person who feeds them stops when they move or go in a nursing home. Then the bears start hitting other food sources that may not be ready for bears on the porch. I also steer clear of bait stations out in the woods, the hunters are supposed to put up warning signs but some do not and once a bear gets hooked on bait nothing is going to get between them and the bait. 

[B.C.C. Lapp]

Spot on.

 Take all bears seriously even 200 pound black bears.

Yes. 200lbs. ? Around here that's a cub.  Still a bear. To be taken seriously for certain, but a cub.   The year before last a guy shot one a few hundred yards from  my house that weighed 690something lbs.    700lb bears are common and the state record is well over 800lbs.

[beenthere]

Last year, in north central WI, a female black bear busted through a home window and attacked a woman. 
Behind the story, seems the woman saw the female black bear in her yard and opened the window to yell and scare the bear away. Apparently there were two cubs nearby and the thought is that the female may have interpreted the woman's voice to be her cubs in danger. Thus the reason for the attack as the bear ran to the house and busted through the window. Was a bit of a scuffle with the husband first beating on the bear to release his wife and then going to his locked gun cabinet to retrieve a gun, load it, and shoot the bear in the hallway of their home. The lady survived with injuries and the husband with scratches. Turns out he was the local police chief.

[ppine]

Lake Tahoe is 1/2 hour from my house.  Some people are dumb enough to feed bears.  There are lots of recreational properties that are only occupied a few weeks a year.  Bears hibernate under decks and in crawl spaces.  They follow the trash schedule.  Some are dependent on garbage for food and do not hibernate at all.  Some of them are enormous with names like "Minivan".  The don't go over fences they go through them.  Some have been weighed at 600 pounds which seem impossible. 

These habituated bears have learned to break into vehicles.  Some of them specialize in breaking into houses.  They peel back the sheathing and push in the drywall.  The typical scenario is, they break into a house in the morning after the occupants are gone.  They pull everything out of the refrigerator and the pantry and spill it on the floor.  Then they eat until they can't eat anymore and take a nap on the floor someplace clean like the living room.  Then the occupants come home. 

Those bears get air lifted to the mountain range behind my house. So these are the ultra-habituated bears and they are put in a drier mountain range with marginal bear habitat.  Then they start to travel and go back where they came from.  We have reports of bears air lifted to Elko 275 miles away and having the same tagged bears return to Lake Tahoe. 

[sawguy21]

We have seen that as well, a habituated bear is a dead bear. I heard a noise behind me, turned around to see a juvenile black with his nose pressed against the living room window. Then the commotion started, the lady upstairs spotted it and started banging pots, yelling and carrying on but he wasn't the least bit concerned. CO said to wait a half hour, if it didn't move on to call back and they would deal with it.
Bears are very territorial, if relocated they will generally find their way back and have to be put down. The animal lovers get wound up but that is just how it is.

[peakbagger]

Years ago we visited an uncle way up in Northern Quebec Smooth Rock Falls. He had house and what looked like brand new mobile home, the bears broke in the mobile home twice by just clawing through the outside walls. He built the house soon after. He had galvanized hardware cloth under the siding. Apparently, the bears claw through the siding but the hardware cloth catches their claws. 

There is book titled a Libertarian Walks Into a Bear about the attempted take over of New Hampshire by Libertarians. It definitely did not go well. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: Author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling on the Free State Project - Vox