The Would-Be Farm: Bears Plus Woods

Rumors about the return of the black bear to the neighborhood of the Would-Be Farm started some years ago. Black bears, like wolves and wood bison, were hunted out of the area a hundred years or so ago. 

I take most such rumors with a grain of salt. There's a black panther, according to the locals, as well as deer-eating bobcats to be worried about when walking in the woods.

Not to mention the often-repeated story about a covert government plot to re-introduce mountain lions into the Adirondacks.  

None of this is impossible, of course, although I'm pretty confident that a bobcat could not manage to get its jaws around the spine of a white-tailed deer. Still, I put it in the wishful category of "maybe, if I see proof."

​Kind of like the skunk-ape of the Everglades, Uncle Markie's sighting notwithstanding.

Our game cameras don't lie, however, and a couple of years back, we had a blurry but unmistakable ursus americana ​sighting.

And chunks of the Would-Be Farm's landscape do seem rather bearish: big patches of brambles and some nice blueberry barrens and broken-rock formations that seem well suited for a bear's long winter torpor. 

As time passed, and given that the black bear is a rover, I figured this one must have just been cruising by on its way someplace else. Just a tourist.

But the other thing that doesn't lie? Scat.

(In the interest of kindness, know that the blog is going to take a bathroom-minded turn. With photos.)

​In July, I took a quick snap of what might be the product of an over-indulgence of berries for a big raccoon. 
​

In October, I took a photo of what's clearly the kind of thing a bear would do in the woods. 

As they say in scatological circles, "That is one big fecal coliform, baby."

Okay, maybe they don't –– turns out that "coliform" doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Huh. 

Still, anyone with an eye for such things would be given pause by the appearance of such a display of large-caliber dung in the middle of the trail. 

Let's hope it doesn't end in statistics and blood.