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Animal Encounters

Great story Memaquay!

I had a cat that chased Raccoons around. I thought that was fun to watch, I have to learn to think big. LOL.
 
Actually Rippy, I’m pretty sure she was sober; had Hello Kitty from Hell been 3 sheets to the wind, Mr. Bear wouldn’t have made it out of the yard.
That’s a sad sight YC. The valiant efforts are encouraging, even if the outlook seems grim. My wife has finally convinced me to look at a “down east” driving trip for next summer. I’d love to kayak (guided) in the Bay of Fundy, and maybe chance upon whales. The idea is still a little unsettling though.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfo...e-turr-hunters-have-close-encounter-1.2448103
Bears and stuff is a bit of a hot button issue around here.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbu...roposal-welcomed-by-sudbury-council-1.2441993
 
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LOL, some good comments there. The bears come into town every summer cause we have so many of them around here. I see anywhere from 20 to 40 bears a summer, on bad years, more. If the blueberry crop fails, or natural sources of food are scarce, we get lots of bears in town. On good years, we only get a few. The dump has put up a big electric fence around it now, and that keeps the bears out of the dump, which I kind of miss. It was fun to go out to the dump and watch a the bears frolic.

I have a love-hate thing with cats. I had a cat once that would go partridge hunting with me, it was dang good at sniffing them out. That was when I lived in Nova Scotia, and partridge were few. I never would have thrown that cat at a bear.

Rob, we aren't allowed to shoot in town, and gun laws being as they are in Canada, even if a bear was eating your children, if you shot it in town, you would probably lose your guns and be charged for dangerous use. Hence the cat defence. It's different outside of town, we shoot problem bears all the time. Shoot, shovel, shut up kind of thing. As I mentioned in previous posts, it was ironic that I couldn't let my kids sleep in a tent in the backyard, but routinely spent a month or two in a ten in the bush and never worried a bit.
 
memaquay said:
I have never witnessed a cat's furry in full tilt, but it is a thing to behold. That cat opened up a can of whoop-arse on that bear, and the bear took off like like it's arse was on fire. About forty feet into the run, the cat ejected safely and returned home, no worse for the wear. After that, whenever Mr. Bear came by, I just let the cat out, and the bear ran like away like Satan himself was after him.
Click to expand...

Memaquay, that is the best Bear Story ever, and well told. I hope you don't mind, but I copied it with attribution and sent it to a few friends.
 
While paddling the interior of Killarney on Harry Lake, I had a bear step on my tent corner. I woke to a leaning tent and when I made a noise hi bolted. He was tangled in the fly cord and took it with him. When I exited the tent I had cornered him by accident between me and the lake. He clicked his jaws, growls lightly and when I backed up slowly he took off. Nervous experience but he acted just a bear would and should so I didn't worry about him anymore.
 
Hi Steve,

It's good to read your posts again.

Those were good stories. You got to spend time watching. I guess that's the reward for being a regular.

Do people see lion sign from time to time?

Fighting deer are rare. My experience is with whitetails, but some of what I'll say should apply to mulies too.

I've done plenty of spying on deer but have seen only one serious fight. Two 6/8 pointers of the same size went at it hard for less than 5 minutes before one broke off and split. They seemed just short of evenly matched.

Now and then I spot young bucks sparing lightly and briefly, like boys at recess.

And in that is the secret. It's a fraternity. Everybody knows everybody else, and thru long association, everybody knows who's who. Just like with men, that latter determination, to the benefit of all, generally is made with little or no hard and dangerous fighting.

More often than not a serious fight is one between two bucks of different communities who are not familiar with each other, who have made the rare and unexpected encounter on neutral ground and who are about equal in size and intimidation factor. Mismatches usually don't happen. A look or a gesture from the obviously bigger or tougher buck is about all it takes to get the other on the highway.

I've wondered about those beavers too. Hope you get a chance to see how it went with them.

Is the trapper checking the line?
 
My friend Gerald forwarded me this picture a few years ago and he gave me permission to post it. He was on the Thelon River in Canada's NWT, he was paddling with a woman he had only met at the trips start, that's her in the picture. From what I remember, they just floated by as the bear watched.
 
While I was digging out Billy's picture Robin gave us all something to think about. How profound a world that there are animals with that much potential.

Anyway Billy Beardashian, his mother, father, brothers and sisters and cousins all live on the mountain behind the house. It's a pretty big woods, about 25 square miles, inaccessible and mostly left alone. Terrain and jealous landowners easily control the hunting, and I don't think anybody here hunts bears. A guest got a bear with a bow earlier this fall. I did not notice any enthusiasm for that among the neighbors, but the guy was a guest and congratulated.



I heard a story a couple of years ago about another visitor who spotted a bear from his stand, but after watching it hunt acorns for 20 minutes he could not shoot it. He said its manner and gestures were sometimes human-like. You could relate to the animal, he said, and after a while there just wasn't the will to harm it.

In this photo, which was taken last year, B was about 2&1/2 years old and ready to go out on his own. I'm confident that he won't make a nuisance of himself anywhere. This is very good bear country around here, and I don't know of anyone who's had problems. You see the bears in the woods from time to time, and someone has seen a very big boar in the hayfield next to the house: B's dad probably.

I wish the racoons were as well behaved as the bears. I shot 11 in 18 months and finally got a guy with hounds to go after them. Seems like we are breaking the clan. It's been a dispute about the barn cats' food.

If it's clear that racoons seem to learn nothing from hunting pressure, I'm not so sure that eastern black bears do either. Even back when the earliest colonials came over the mountains, when what is now WV had been a No-Man's-Land for about 250 years and very, very lightly and patchily hunted and trapped, black bears enjoyed the same reputation that they do today - shy. One account from 1750 explained that the only tight spot came when a bull woods bison charged into the middle of the small scouting party. Bulls have a bad rep. They saw bears routinely.

50 miles north of here a small and popular campground has had a bear problem for decades. The DNR traps the trouble makers. That campground is in the middle of a a very popular bear hunting area. The same bears that run before the hounds will breeze into your camp, urbane and hungry, stare you down and attack your cooler. That's eastern black bears.

Everybody knows about grizzlies. But what about grizzlies and hunting pressure? They were hunted to extermination in most of the western US. It is also certain that extreme hunting pressure did not improve the disposition of one single grizzly bear.

My neighbor's nephew's trail cams are a hit around here.
 
Mike,

Yes. He has become pretty obsessed and has 6 camera's out, 20-30K pictures and didn't hunt at all last year. There's bobcats, owls, coyotes, turkeys, racoons(of course), deer, possums skunks and I don't know what else. The whole neighborhood.

You look up there, the knobs are 1K above the fields and close, and you know the place is busy.
 
That's quite a collection of wildlife on that mountain. And yet no Sasquatch. He's not trying hard enough. Just kidding.
Trail cams have really come down in price. I'm guessing they're intended to check for game trail activity. Looks like your neighbour's nephew is onto a whole new nature/recreational activity : trail cam viewing. I'm not poking fun here, I'm serious. We are all either lucky, or unlucky, depending upon the outcome of our animal encounter. Trail cams take that out of the equation IMO. I wonder if that's the future market of trail cams. With all that animal activity on your mountain, a trail cam is a great peek into an Appalachian garden. I mean it. If that were my "hood", I'd jealously protect it too. We should all be so lucky to have a back yard so full of life.
 
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Brad,You got bullseyes. He is having fun. There's also more to the story.The neighbors have been on that farm for about 100 years, in the valley for 250. They, like most farmers in the eastern US since colonial days, have farmed part time on more or less 200 acres. Typically there's some other, outside occupation as well. Here and elsewhere 200 acres was about what a family could afford, live on and manage.The life-long, generations deep, daily involvement that these people have had with their woods, fields and streams is hard to credit if you don't know that kind of life. It's a life that is fading fast. Nephew was raised by his aunt and uncle on that farm. In his late 20s, he's a heavy equipment operator, lives in an apartment in another part of the state, is sent to job sites around the region, and doesn't get so much time in the woods anymore. A young daughter, a difficult ex-wife, a pregnant girlfriend. Get the picture? The chain is being broken.He comes back as often as he can. One of the things he and Laura do is check the cameras and spend some time in the the tree stands watching the animals come in. They are there for the food, of course, but they also live out some of their lives right in front of you, and that is a spectacle worth seeing. A lot like what Memaquay said about watching bears at the land fill in the old days.And nephew earned the "on the ground" merit badge a long time ago. Just possibly he and his uncle and two cousins collectively have logged nearly as much woods, field and stream time as the whole readership of this site: they live in the middle of it, and as one described it all, "There's not much else out here to do for fun but hunt, fish, trap and pick."West Virginia is just about all forested mountains, and especially in my part of it, the animal and forest scene I described is common.Fewer and fewer people hunt, the forest has grown back in the 85 years since the logging boom collapsed, and as more and more people give up farming, fields become overgrown and then go back to woodland.The population continues to fall. The 1920s pop of WV was about 4 million. It'a a big eastern state. Now it's less than 2. Of the 3 counties I range, the one with the smallest population had just under 10K people when I arrived in the mid 1980s. Now it has about 7500, and it's an aged population, most of it concentrated around 3 towns. Land area is 1K square miles, most of it forest. Half of the county is national forest. Everywhere in the region land increasingly is held by fewer and fewer people. Large holding owners account for most of the acreage(always been like this) and a lot of those don't live here. Not long ago many thought that the housing boom of the early 2Ks would bring out lots of people. The market did get hot, but that didn't last long or go far enough.Now some of the big fish are bailing. I just heard that a nearby 160,000 acre tract - of mostly woods - will soon be auctioned for back taxes. The owner said he was tired of carrying the place because it was not earning him anything. He just walked. More of this about to happen I hear.Trail cams are cheap and getting better all the time. Now there's also commercially available camera drones. A friend hired one of the latter recently. The stuff looks pretty good. Imagine the potential.As you said, seeing and understanding wildlife will always involve luck, but I add that mostly it takes study and time in the bush. As the dean of wildlife photographers, Leonard Lee Rue, once said, "Time= Results". Wild animals generally lead quiet and orderly lives. Once you spend enough time out there you can begin to connect the dots find insights that are hard to imagine unless you experience the journey. Today about the only people who go that far are research biologists. But long ago Indian hunters and colonial frontier trappers and hunters did just that of course. A NARRATIVE OF THE CAPTIVITY AND ADVENTURES OF JOHN TANNER is the best hint I have read. It's about a man who spent his life as an Ojibway after being captured by Shawnee on the KY frontier as a boy in the late 1700s.Thanks again to nephew's cameras. The flock stays at about 30 birds. During the grasshopper and cricket season, while the poults are growing, it spends a lot of time in the hay fields. Mine are near the house, and I see it most days if I am around. On a friend's much bigger farm with much bigger fields, there is a flock of 60.I hope these guys get hunting. Once again we are awash with deer.
 
Thanks for your eloquent and personal reply Acer, it touched me. I didn’t realize you were in WV, a very special place (I know, they all are) close to my heart (I know, they all are). I have an uncle from those parts, and he’s humble about it. He reminds me that times were tough growing up there, but have gotten tougher. I keep my mouth shut and nod my head, knowing full well that I likely have no idea what tough times are really like.
I won’t bore you or anyone else with stories of our travels through those mountains (failing brakes on a crazy snaky, drive down, or a flat tire adventure in a small town); as every thing I post, all true (life is so much crazier and fun than fiction could ever dream up), except one small moment with life changing results. We stopped on the Skyline Drive (is that the name?) at a small pull over spot. I set up our Coleman on the stone wall dividing us from the dizzying drop down the mountainside, and made breakfast for our family. Over coffee, eggs and bacon, we all scanned the ridges and breathed the air. It’s funny how you always look up, but for some reason I looked down. I saw the Shenandoah (I think that’s the river?) and a white clapped board farmhouse in a green valley setting far below. I never knew anywhere still existed so perfect and unspoiled. That image has stayed with me ever since. I’m sorry to go all soft and mushy, but that’s just the way it is. We enjoyed a lot of family moments driving around Appalachia, posting letters from tiny remote post offices, wading pebbly brooks running through quiet villages, and meeting other camper’s kids around our car-camping fire – giggling at each other’s funny accents…No big adventures, but a hell of a lot of life changing small ones. Like I say, I’ve no need to make stuff up, life is way bigger and incredible than mere fiction. I’m gonna always get my brakes checked before anymore wandering through those mountains though.
 
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acer said:
Do people see lion sign from time to time?...........

......I've wondered about those beavers too. Hope you get a chance to see how it went with them.

Is the trapper checking the line?
Click to expand...

Acer - good to read you again too.

We see a lot of lion sign - but not as much, now that the wolves have become common. I don't know the actual reason for that. On the same trip that we watched the fighting bucks, we were followed from just below our high spike camp down almost in to our base camp by a lone cougar. We know this, because when we went back up, our tracks in the snow were covered over by the cougar's.

The beavers are still actively maintaining the dam. Idaho law requires trappers to check each trap every two days, and I don't doubt that this one was doing so. A trapped duck would have fallen victim to an eagle before very long. I technically violated the law by releasing the duck, but that action was approved by the game warden (on the phone) on the grounds that I do nothing to damage or remove the trap. I wouldn't anyway - I simply left it closed. I have nothing against legal trapping, but I also know little about setting a trap.
 
Steve,

I wasn't expecting "...a lot of lion sign....", but I am encouraged by the news. Somehow it makes me feel good that there's such a well established population.

Maybe someone one knows about the wolf/cougar dynamic. Is it that wolves drive cougars off, or is it that there are fewer deer to support a cougar population? Of course it might be something else altogether. Time will tell. How long have the wolves been around? How often do people in that area see cougars? Wolves?

By the way, one of the things I remember reading years ago was that wolf predation stirs up deer movements and social structures enough to cause more genetic mixing: the populations are more genetically diverse, and that's good for their adaptive potential.


Around here many otherwise steady people swear that they have seen cougars. But there's never been found a single track, scat, hair or kill. People who spend a lot of time in the woods, to a one, say no. But two pet African lions did get released a few years ago. Talking with people who discovered them in the forest would be a fun interview.

I did not think those beavers were going to stick. The channel looked too straight and strong to my eye. All of our stick dam and lodge beavers live at nearly 4K' here and their stuff is under snow or will be soon. I'll get up there this winter. Beaver meadows can be storybook pretty under snow. I've seen ermine in them too, porpoising in dry snow.

Right move with the duck. Right call by the warden. I did not know that there's any market for muskrat skins. In the 1800s muskrat was something you could get at high end restaurants in NYC. At least one place listed it as "Marsh Rabbit' on the menu. In the day I thought I'd try it. The darkest, reddest meat you'l ever see. I lost it to a power outage while I was out of town. That was nothing compared to the fallout from the turkey breast that I left on the counter by mistake before leaving on that same trip. The flyspecks had flyspecks.
 
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