Last Night, I observed a black bear for an hour and thirty minutes. I had seen the bear cross the road at a run, then stop about a hundred feet into the
young woods. The trees there all appeared to be black locusts about twenty feet
high. The bushes between the bear and me had lost some of their leaves, allowing
me to make out the outline of the bear’s head and torso in profile.
The bear was chewing on something that cracked loudly. I could hear a loud snap, followed a second or so later by another.
Sometimes there would be a number of snaps irregularly spaced, then silence for ten seconds or so
Darkness arrived, so that I could no longer see into the bushes,
but the percussion serenade continued. Of course, I was safely sitting in my
car with everything shut off. As other cars approached along the road, I looked
to the other side of the road from where the bear was. I hoped the cars would
drive by without seeing the bear. If a bunch of yahoos all got out of their cars,
video cams and flash cameras going as they yelled, “BEAR! Over here! Come-on! Bring your camera!”, then
the bear would leave. I wanted my private one-way communications with the bear
to continue. The charging tourists would not capture any images of the partly
hidden bear before they frightened it away.
At my volunteer job at the information desk, I tell people where
to go to enjoy the park. Visitors often ask, “Where can we see a bear?” My answer is usually, “Bears go where they want to go, and often don’t
follow the same travel pattern over and over. So you just have to keep your eyes
and ears open.” Was it my job, now, to let them know, “Here is a
bear?” I did not feel selfish, keeping the bear to myself.
This morning, in the daylight, I returned to the same spot and
walked into the brush, slowly looking for what the bear had been chewing.
Click on the images to see them larger.
I found broken, shattered pieces of bone. It would take a forensics expert to determine what critter had been the former owner of those long straight
thin bones. They looked like perhaps the leg bones of a young white-tailed deer
that had perished earlier in the summer. However, I am not a forensics expert.
I do know, that for a while, a bear played percussion music for
me.
-- Bob Kuhns
