Adventures of Tiny the Black Bear

Tiny is my favorite black bear, after only Milton, who I fear is dead. Tiny is so huge that he dwarfs other bears in our area.

Over the past couple of weeks, the bear mating frenzy has died down. Tiny is alone most of the time. One of his favorite things to do is find water to drink, bathe, and swim.

His choices for finding water are limited as many water holes are completely dried up. He did find a stock tank. He took a long drink and then climbed in. Will it be big enough? You'll see in the video.

The next night, Tiny found a much better place to swim - a real pond! He swam in circles, looking as if he was simply enjoying cooling off, like a human! And, discovering that he swam in this particular pond solved a mystery for me of why he was regularly showing up at a certain marking tree soaking wet.

When I last posted about Tiny, someone commented "I'd hate to meet him on the trail". Within an hour of reading that comment, I got a note from a friend saying "Met your big bear. HUGE!!!!". Amazingly, I discovered that I had a cam in the vicinity of that encounter.

Here was Tiny running from my friend.

And here was my friend continuing his commute to work after recovering from the shock of meeting such a huge bear.

Even though Tiny probably weighs about twice as much as my friend, Tiny fled from him. That fact made me SO happy. As long as Tiny is afraid of people, he stands a much better chance of staying alive.

Here's the footage in the form of a short video.