Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I agree with DC Donna - If I have two young children with me and a bear approaches we are out of there. Now if I could grab the food with me so it doesn't get the "reward" I would do so. However, my safety and the safety of my children come first. I can't read a bear's mind to know what its intentions are. IMO better to err on the side of caution.
Thank you! There was no way of knowing whether this was a Mama Bear, desperate for food for her cubs. (I forgot to mention that when we first spotted her, she was foraging in a trash can for lunch.) It is very likely that she would have thought "ah-ha - these folks have a great meal, and it's just a few feet away" - and the prudent thing was for us to play it safe.
People HAVE been attacked by black bears in Yellowstone. I didn't want my family to be among them.
You're being very brave suggesting that I - along with a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old - keep munching on our lunch as a big bear (300 pounds or whatever) comes ambling about wanting some food from our table. Visitors were WARNED that these black bears, cute and harmless as they may appear, may become aggressive, especially when food is at stake.
No.
I'm not being brave at all.
I can just do very basic math.
Over four million (that's 4,000,000+) people visit Yellowstone annually. The park sees an average of one bear attack per year. Most of these are brown bears. Most of these involve surprises - a hiker rounds a corner downwind from a bear with something masking sound (wind, a rushing stream) and the person is well within the bear's comfort zone. The bear proceeds to show the perceived threat who's boss. This situation was one of those.
Let me repeat: more people die to and from and on Yellowstone roads every year than do from bears attacking them in the park. But you're inured to the risks of road, so even though it's greater than that from bears, you obeyed your emotions instead of being logical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DCDonna
And of course everything is a risk. But that doesn't mean that you intentionally set up a competition for food between a bear several feet away and yourselves, especially since rangers warned visitors to maintain a safe distance.
We did the right thing.
'several feet', huh? This was the '500-lb.' bear, right?
Can you show me an instance of a bear assaulting people for their food in Yellowstone? Maybe - maybe - before the park banned feeding bears around 1970. Since? Um ... no. It doesn't happen. Period.
I once opened up the door to the house where I lived in college, in Duluth. Bear country. And I surprised a black bear. It ran up the nearest tree - as startled as I was, the bear was clearly even more afraid. I continued on my way. The bear stayed up in the tree.
That is black bear behavior.
You watch too much television.
And you refuse to let the reality of the math trump your emotions. You should have taken the food with you if you were that terrified. Or you could simply have continued to eat your meal. The reality is that you could have run pell-mell at the bear and it would have fallen all over itself to get away from the scary human.
if you can't handle dealing rationally with wildlife, you should avoid Yellowstone.
It wasn't a 500-lb. black bear. Even 300-pounders are quite rare.
Yes, you should have just continued with your lunch. You watch too much television. You 'chanced it' by driving to the park, risking becoming one or more of the 35,000+ people who die each year on U.S. roads. Everything is a risk. The ratio of bear attacks to Yellowstone visitors is in the millions-to-one range, and those are disproportionately brown bear attacks.
It's not the end of the world, but perhaps you should understand that you are quite misinformed about bears. They present a certain risk, yes, but so do many thinks. Just eating your lunch while a black bear looked at you? Again, the odds of an attack were less than the odds of a serious auto accident. And you risked that.
Perspective. Facts should rule over emotions.
Let's see you say that, and act on it, when you have small children with you and have never seen a live bear in a natural setting before. We give all kinds of respect to a bear mother's protective instinct; let's show some respect to a human mama following her protective instinct.
Which is why continuing to talk to it was not making it "more aware" of their presence but might have attracted it's curiousity. You want it to be aware of you not to focus it's attention on you.
Talking calmly in a low voice is exactly the right thing to do. I've done it with every bear I've ever encountered in the woods, and that's a fair number. You want it to know that you are not a threat, and you are not changing from a non-threat into a threat.
Talking calmly in a low voice is exactly the right thing to do. I've done it with every bear I've ever encountered in the woods, and that's a fair number. You want it to know that you are not a threat, and you are not changing from a non-threat into a threat.
How does the bear know that talking to it is a signal of non-threat versus a signal of immenent attack? Would you take a low growl from a bear as a non-threatening signal to let you know it means no harm?
How does the bear know that talking to it is a signal of non-threat versus a signal of immenent attack? Would you take a low growl from a bear as a non-threatening signal to let you know it means no harm?
Talking in a calm voice and not making wild gestures implies that you are sure of your ground, not upset and your intentions are not aggressive. What you are asking the bear for is respect. Bears communicate with each other using low volume rumblings and grumblings all the time. They are intended to put the other bear on notice that they've been acknowledged. If you were intending to threaten the bear (and that is essentially what they care about) you'd probably be yelling and screaming at it. Likewise an upset bear would be roaring, bawling, swatting at the air or ground.
Talking calmly in a low voice is exactly the right thing to do. I've done it with every bear I've ever encountered in the woods, and that's a fair number. You want it to know that you are not a threat, and you are not changing from a non-threat into a threat.
Talking in a calm voice and not making wild gestures implies that you are sure of your ground, not upset and your intentions are not aggressive. What you are asking the bear for is respect. Bears communicate with each other using low volume rumblings and grumblings all the time. They are intended to put the other bear on notice that they've been acknowledged. If you were intending to threaten the bear (and that is essentially what they care about) you'd probably be yelling and screaming at it. Likewise an upset bear would be roaring, bawling, swatting at the air or ground.
Who said to yell and scream at it? How would standing there not talking or moving be seen as threatening? I see the bear whisperers have arrived.
Wife and I have a lot of respect for these guys. We have had black bears in our yard where we lived in Maine (we had 12 acres of trees), and now that we retired to northern Michigan, (again a 10 acre treed parcel), just had a new one visit us here last week. We woke to tracks just outside our back door. We are definitely in their home, not the other way around. Recently, we were hiking a trail about 5 miles from our house, and in a large open meadow, ran across recent tracks there too. There are very few attacks up here, but we heard from other hikers that day that a bear had recently charged a hiker at that same meadow, but it turned and went into the woods without harming the hiker.
These experiences slowly add up. Now when I have to go out for a chore on my property at night, I can't shake the feeling that I'm being watched. Kinda creepy.
I saw this a while ago. Did the bear notice the person when it approached or only after it walked away?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
