The girl who cried bear!!

Okay...the last two weeks have been for the black bears. For those of you who do not know, we have black bears here in PA. The first time I saw one in the wild was a few years ago when Dan and I were driving to our Pastors house to get our dogs and bring them home. It was right by the road and just bounding up the hill. It was huge (maybe some of the size could have been that it was getting dark out already and well, black bears are black...but still it was pretty big)!!

Since that time I've seen two at our local Animal land...in a very, very small cage.

I took my mom to animal land for her b-day 2 years ago and these were the bears.

Then two weeks ago Michael told me how at camp (he was a counselor) he took a bears temperature (I'm waiting to see if someone took a picture of that). I guess the forest ranger brought a bear to do s presentation for the teens...they only do it if they capture one. There is a mange infection going around and they want to treat the bears before it gets too bad. The ranger asked for a volunteer and Mike, not knowing what he was getting into, volunteered. Afterwards, we found out that they had captured the bear in the area where we live (they check the bear and tag it then let it go free back where they caught it). So everyone was joking about how now that bear will be gunning for Mike!

Last week they captured another bear, who apparently was not afraid of humans, and therefore going right up to homes and camps...not a good thing as this is a wild animal. So, by capturing it and tagging it they hope it will now fear humans. The ranger once again brought the bear to camp (by the way the bears are knocked out cold when they are there). This time my mom was able to hear the presenation...she was so excited! Mike was also a conselor last week for the junior camp...but no this time they didn't have to take a temperature, just tag it.

Okay...then yesterday at church the Pastor's wife was showing us pictures of a bear and her two cubs who is on their mountain (we live in a little valley and they live on the hill directly in front of us). We were all oohing and aahhing at the photos. On the way home as we were rounding a curve I saw a bear in the weeds. I called out, "Mom! A bear!" She slowed down and as we rounded the corner and the weeds parted the bear was right there!!! Less then 5-6 feet away...boy was I glad to have the car as protection! It stood on it's hind legs all the way up to it's full height! That was quite an awesome sight! (I'm not very good at estimating, but my mom said it looked like it could have been over 5 feet and at least 500-600 pounds.) It then turned and ran. As we slowly started to drive again I looked into the woods and saw two little cubs running. I assume that these are the same bears that were in the pictures from church. Unfortunately, we did not a have a camera, but it was amazing how close we were to see the bears.

Every Sunday my brothers run home from church (we are only 2 miles from church) well, we had just talked about how a mother bear will protect her cubs and not knowing what way the bears ran, my mom and I were nervous about the boys running home and wondering if they would meet the bears. So we drove out...with camera in hand...to pick them up (we had the Barger's over for lunch after church and Vance was running with my bro's as well).

We did not see the bears again...but I'm keeping a lookout and a close watch on the dogs...don't want to stumble on that mother bear!