A Bear Family Saga

You might remember, back in May, that my trail camera spotted a mother bear and two cubs. One cub was chocolate and the other was black.

One very cool thing was that we watched this mother bear back when she was a yearling cub, separating from her mother. She has distinctively dark leg fur compared to her cinnamon body so I dubbed her "Socks". Her mother has disappeared (since last fall) so it's a consolation that her daughter, Socks, is carrying on the tradition. Female offspring, like Socks, always stay close to where they were born.

After that May sighting, Socks and her cubs were invisible from my trail cameras until August. In early August, a black cub appeared on a trail cam's video, limping very badly. No other bears, like his/her mom or sibling, appeared. You'll see that video as part of the larger video below.

I didn't want everyone else to worry like I was so I didn't share the injured cub video. I also didn't share the photos that I captured of Socks with one cub, the chocolate one, later in August.

 Here, they sniffed a tree together.

And, here, they sniffed another bear marking tree together.

I kept hoping that maybe the little black cub was just outside the view of the camera... but, then, even I started to lose hope in that possibility. I'd captured photos of them at 4 different sites, and the black cub was never with them.

Yesterday, I made a video combining all the trail camera footage of this family, and I ended it by expressing the hope that the little black cub would show up again. He sure looked spunky, despite his injury, in the early August video. I planned to share that video today.

But first, this morning, I decided to go to a popular bear hang-out to make one more check of whether the black cub had showed up. GUESS WHAT!!!! He did. He is still limping but he's weighting his bad limb (back right) a bit, and he wasn't using it at all on August 6. He's a couple of miles from his mom and sibling but he's within his mom's territory. There is still a chance that the family will reunite before they hibernate.

I don't have any great insight about what happened to his limb or how the family got separated. My first guess is always "hit by a car". However, I suppose that a predator or wandering dog could have hurt him. Perhaps he simply couldn't keep up with his mom after his injury, and she lost track of him. Those are all guesses. We'll probably never know what actually happened.

Without further ado, here is the video! If you have trouble viewing it here, you can watch it at Youtube.

I promise to keep you updated on any further glimpses of this family!!!