Dancing Bears in Autumn

I know that winter is almost here when I start finding Shyla soaking up the warmth of sun puddles.

This is the time when the vegetation around us turns brown, readying itself for freezing air and snow.


It's also the time of year when bears have one last flurry of activity. On 10/2, a bear approached a sad bear-marking tree. It's "sad" because mountain bikers decided to widen a trail, and they cut off all its branches. It's just ahead of the bear in this photo.

These marking trees are so important to bears that they keep marking them, even after humans have denuded them.

This is a beautiful sow!

A few miles away, trail cams captured other bears marking trees like crazy. A small sow first marked a tree. Then, Milton Sr. did his own dance. Milton Sr. is the long-term big male of our area. He was badly injured a few years ago, and another big male ("Tiny") tried to take over the territory. Since then, they've both patrolled the area, often getting into "marking wars" where one marks over the other one's scent as often as they can. That happened in this video.

If you need a good laugh at the bear antics or just want to see some wild bears in action, enjoy the video!

Happy very late autumn from the Rockies!

Milton the Black Bear Returns for 2016!

While we relaxed in the desert, about 4 different black bears showed up on my trail cameras. Today, I want to share just the footage of "Milton", a long-lived and big male black bear who I've watched for years.

In the spring of 2013, he badly injured himself, and I feared that we'd never see him again. I was wrong. He disappeared for a while. He played very little role in the 2014 mating season - he didn't appear marking trees on Black Bear Trail. However, last year, he returned, looking stronger than ever!

The first glimpse of him this year was marking a tree on Black Bear Trail several miles from our house. He is a big and strong bear!

In the next couple of hours, he walked the miles to our house and showed up to work on how to pull down our bear-proof birdfeeders. I had a trail camera that shoots video pointed at the birdfeeding station that caught all his antics. You can watch the video here or at Youtube.

He didn't gain anything from all that effort. In fact, there was no food hanging up high on the feeding station. However, he did leave the pole leaning rather obviously in one direction. I think that the bird feeding station's inventor, the Runner, won this round but I also think that Milton is getting closer to a solution! The battle goes on!

None of the bears photographed by my trail cams have been the sow and cubs from the den yet. To make absolutely sure that I don't upset that bear family, I'm waiting a little longer before I go get the memory cards from the cams at their den.

While Milton worked on our birdfeeding station, we were oblivious because we were in the desert. Normally, we would've been out chasing a bear away after the dogs started barking at him. Instead, we were enjoying this quiet faraway campsite...

There were no bears at this campsite although lizards skittered around all the rocks!

Milton the Black Bear

Trail camera photos of bears make my heart sing. Shortly after one of our big April storms, a bear walked in the woods. Look at the size of his hind paw covered in sticky snow.

This bear is not "Tiny". Unlike Tiny, this bear has a white blaze on his chest. However, he's as big as Tiny, which tells me that he's "Milton", usually the most prominent male bear in our area during mating season.

He is passing a bear tree in these photos but did not mark it. Indeed, both he and Tiny have passed this tree several times in the past month but neither has marked it yet.

He gazed into the distance before moving along.

Compared to those snowy days when Milton was traipsing around the forest, we've had gorgeous weather recently. Shyla and I have adored our sunny and warm bike rides.

Alas, another storm is starting right now. No one seems to know how much snow it will bring - but it could be a big storm. I feel like covering my eyes just like Shyla!

I'll try to visualize Columbines falling from the sky as it snows, because of course, the gorgeous wildflowers cannot grow without the spring snows!