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Bear. Eheheh. My mom and sisters and I took a camping trip in the Sierras one summer. We were in an established camp with hose bibs, bathrooms, et cetera; not out in the boonies, but it was tucked right up against the mountains. My mom and I slept in one tent, and my sisters in the other. Being absolute townies, we left the cooler outside at night. Well, one night my mom woke me up to tell me that there was a bear outside.
Yup. Bear. Leaning over the cooler for all the world like a fat dude in fur trousers, one forepaw holding the lid up and rummaging around in the cooler with the other. He pulled out the carton of orange juice, spiked it with his claws, and had a nice long drink. Meanwhile we tried to decide what to do while my sisters had a very quiet nervous breakdown in their tent. Finally we got the courage up to start yelling. The bear looked around with a surprised expression on his face, then waddled off into the bushes. We put the cooler in the truck and spent a restless night.
The next morning we compared notes with other campers. We felt pretty stupid for leaving the cooler out at night . . . but not as stupid as the people who had left out the cooler full of steaks and hot sausage. Apparently the bear visited them before he visited us. No wonder he wanted a cool drink! 😆
😯 Some story, Barrdwing – I’m glad nothing happened to you or your mom or siblings!
Same to you, asinnamon – I hope the bear doesn’t cause any trouble. When I first looked at the picture, I thought I was just seeing a black labrador.It was a bear free night, yah!! I finally got some sleep after my husband got home…
We used to do a lot of tent camping and we always worried about bears in the spring and early summer. Never saw one tho. Now we have a hybrid camper and I don’t really worry about bears anymore…
Still glad to be moving back into civilization on Saterday….
asinnamon wrote:It was a bear free night, yah!! I finally got some sleep after my husband got home…
We used to do a lot of tent camping and we always worried about bears in the spring and early summer. Never saw one tho. Now we have a hybrid camper and I don’t really worry about bears anymore…
Still glad to be moving back into civilization on Saterday….
Hybrid camper?
One time my parents went camping in a tent and heard a lot of noise outside, my mom wanted my dad to go see what was going on so he stood up and unzipped the tent only to be pretty much face to face with a black bear. She said she about had a heart attack. There’s also cougars running around our area now. They shot one downtown (yes, down town!) the other week! And it was NOT missing from a zoo!
I probably would have been so scared I would have had a heart attack bears scare me they are so big and strong. I am glad nobody was hurt and you didn’t have any damage to your house.
bear! I’d have had my face pressed against the glass watching it O.O so irresistible…(<—isn't the smartest thing in the world to do, but I'm not the smartest girl 😉 )
I’m 35 and can honestly say that I have never been camping. Ever. I’m such a urbanite. 😆 If I can’t have a hot shower in the morning, I ain’t going. That’s what I tell my bf. 😉
😆 😆 @ the “Fat dude in fur trousers” image.
I was a biology major in college, focused on Wildlife Management, and have a pretty good background knee deep in critters….
Okay, believe it or else, 😉 but there are bears in NJ. I have seen at least 2 or 3 in different parts of the state, including where I live, which backs onto a 12,600 acre wildlife management area, Collier’s Mills. One of my dearest friends was a zookeeper at Silver Spring in FL, and her area of expertise is bears.
Here’s some info, NOT to freak you out more, but so you can correct things hopefully before you have a regular visitor. 😛 So here’s the scoop:Bears are omnivores; they eat EVERYTHING. Emphasis on EVERYTHING. Including dog chow, cat chow, (and the dogs and cats that eat the chow! 😯 )bird seed, trash, the barbecue grill, and anything they can get to in one’s home. They have incredible memories that are only exceeded by their appetites. If a bear finds food somewhere, that bear will return on a regular basis for roughly the next 5 YEARS in the hopes that he will again find food there.
There are very few things that are *truly* “bear proof”, including locking food items in one’s vehicles. Yellowstone Nat’l Park has an untold number of reports of bears breaking into vehicles to get to coolers inside. We have had reports verified here in NJ of bears going through screen doors to get to food that people were cooking, WHILE they were cooking it! 😯 So locking stuff in the car isn’t a good idea.
As long as it is not a sow with cubs, yelling and banging stuff, waving one’s arms to make yourself bigger looking and turning on lights, BIG barking dogs, (not little ones–they are on the menu) should have an effect; however if it’s a sow w/ cubs, advancing and/or threatening is probably NOT a good idea. 😉 If faced with a bear DO NOT RUN but back away slowly while yelling things like Hey BEAR! Go AWAY, BEAR! And no, I’m not joking. Running will trigger the bear’s prey drive and cause it to chase you, and trust me on this, you can’t outrun a bear. Any food of any kind, incuding garbage should NOT be stored outside. If you are going to feed the birds, keep your seed inside a closed container in the garage behind a closed door, and clean up anything that spills. Hang your feeder from a very high branch, and suspended far enough down on a rope that it can’t be gotten to from either the branch or the ground. Put your trash out on the very morning the collector’s come, preferrably AS they’re coming down the road.
If I can think of any other bear tips, I’ll post, but that’s it for now. Hope it helps!I believe you tasgrs….We saw a bear a year or two ago….crossing the road, out where there are more woods than around my house. I couldn’t believe my eyes….I had never seen one in the wild before.:shock:
I prefer small, pleasant wildlife…like birds and chipmunks. 😆Jasmine wrote:I’m 35 and can honestly say that I have never been camping. Ever. I’m such a urbanite. 😆 If I can’t have a hot shower in the morning, I ain’t going. That’s what I tell my bf. 😉
I used to go camping every weekend when I was younger. I’d go for week long canoe trips, backpacking; anything to get out of the city area I lived/worked in. When I met my husband, he’d never really gone camping, and thought it would be a cool thing to do.
So I figured, what the heck; and introduced him to my favorite camground. We get the camp all set up; tents up, sleeping bags laid out–everything’s fine. Cooked a couple of steaks, sat around with our guitars, burned the trash, and got ready to turn in. Cooler was trussed up tight and hung from a large tree branch out of reach of anything that couldn’t undo the rope. So….the hubby gets up to “answer the phone”…nature call… 😉 Comes back over by me and says, I smell a skunk. I sniff, don’t smell anything, said so, and he says, no, come over here. So I go over there, sniff, and yup. I smell it too. I shone the flashlight around the edge of the campsite, and there’s Pepe–standing right next to the door of the tent, waving and asking what else is on the menu? Yippee…..The hubby, who is the Ultimate City Slicker, ducks down, grabs a ROCK, COCKS HIS ARM TO THROW, and I grabbed him and yelled NO!
Pepe wanders over by the fire, sniffs around, and waddles off into the tall grass. So what does the hubby do? He tosses the freakin’ rock at the skunk, hoping to “scare him off”. Trouble was, he overshot the skunk, who immediately came back into the campsite. We slept in the car that night. I made the hubby sleep on the driver’s side of an 1984 Chevy Camaro…..I was SOOOOOOOO pissed. 😈 We haven’t gone camping ever since.
Flash forward about 10 years….we were up in the same general area as the Skunk Episode. It was late Nov., we took a short hike at Sunrise Mt. to see what was left of the fall foliage. As we were getting back in the truck, I jokingly said to the hubby, keep your eyes peeled: this is prime bear territory, and they’re stocking up for the winter. You never know, we might see a bear. This was back in the early 90’s prior to the bear population explosion here. So he kind of scoffed, thinking I was truly shining him on. So we get in the truck, head down the mountain, and through Stokes State Forest. Came down a hill, and back up the other side, and something caught my eye off to the right side of the road, so I stopped the truck. This HUGE 450 lb black bear waddled out into the middle of the road, about 15 feet in front of the truck, stopped and stared back at us. I go Oh, COOL! The hubby, however was not similarly impressed, and all I heard him say was Holy $**T!!! That’s a freakin’ BEAR! DRIVE!! DRIVE!! BEAR! BEAR!!! I looked at him, and he was so totally freaked out. Have I mentioned he’s a city person? LMAO! The bear ambled off on his merry way, and once he was gone, I put the truck in gear and drove on. I wish I’d had my camera with me that day. I don’t know which would’ve been the better photo; the bear or my hubby’s expression. 😈
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