Hungry Bears and Fawns

The suspect makes his first pre-dawn appearance.

 

My "neighborhood" is a little too rural for apps like Nextdoor, but we do have a text-message network. It lit up a few days ago when a young (I'd say yearling) black bear started doing the equivalent of squeezing the door handles of all the parked cars.

Before long he (?) was spotted at this house and that. Over the next few days he knocked over wheelie bins (that should have been indoors), got into some smelly fertilizer, and committed other mischief.

We are in a drought. Spring fruit like wild plums and chokecherries basically did not happen.  The days are hot with a series of Red Flag fire warnings. (My volunteer department rolled out on one small wildlife fire on the 17th.) 

No doubt the little bear is hungry. 

He appeared behind our house during when I was away on the fire. His scent must have drifted in, because M. said that Marco the Chesapeake Bay retriever jumped up barking and ran for the back door, where she looked out and saw the bear up on the trees.

Another neighbor posted said the bear checked out his propane grill. Elsewhere, the yearling broke into a shed where some livestock feed was stored. The shed's owner has now added an electric fence and placed an elected "unwelcome mat" at the door. 

I  got up  Friday to find that someone had dug up up soil in an outdoor planter, knocking two tomato cages and the Walls o' Water that they support onto the ground. Luckily the plants survived. 

The local game warden came around and gave another neighbor a bag of the non-lethal rubber-ball 12 gauge shotgun shells. They pass those out like candy.

The recipient rode around on his side-by-side distributing them, so I have a couple placed at hand. It's never come to that in the past, probably won't this time either, but there they are.

All this past winter, a mule deer doe (last seen visibly pregnant) and her yearling offspring hung out in the oak brush close to our house. 

All around, fawns should be dropping now.  And although black bears do not hunt prey the way that mountain lions do, they like fresh fawn.

There used to be a buffalo ranch about ten miles from here, and the owner once told me that during calving, black bears would come off the mountain to hunt the calves. You would think that Mama Buffalo would be a formidable opponent but apparently the bears get though some times.

(In Yellowstone, a grizzly bear recently nabbed an elk calf in front of an assembly of tourists. 

[Wildlife researcher John Winnie, Jr.] wasn’t there when the grizzly first found that calf, but said one of his students witnessed the moment. The bear’s head suddenly snapped in the calf’s direction right before she moved in and found the helpless young elk.

That probably means Storm [the grizzly] heard the calf rustling in the grass, or caught a glimpse of it moving, Winnie said.

Once Storm started eating, it was hard to watch, he said.

The calf cried out as it was being devoured, but no other elk heard it.

“The nearest cow elk we saw were probably out of earshot, 400 to 500 yards away,” Winnie said.

In Yellowstone, spring calving produces about 80 calves per 100 cow elk, he said. but “by the time the first of the next year rolls around in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we’re down to around 20 to 25 calves per 100 cows. And most of the calves that were lost were lost to predation."

 Deer and Deer Hunting magazine, which is devoted to whitetail deer-hunting, posted on X (formerly Twitter) a scout camera video from John Lockburner Jr. (Sussex County, N.J.) of a black bear taking a whitetail fawn. The post said, " According to scientific research by John J. Ozoga in Michigan, yearling black bears can reduce fawn survival by as much as 22% annually."

You can hear the fawn bawling. 

 So in this drought year, will this yearling bear get a taste for fawn?