Bear Sighting

One of the things we do as Visitor Center Hosts is document cougar and bear sightings.  Normally a visitor will come in from a hike in the backcountry and tell us about something they saw.  Many will even share the photographs they got.  We write up the sighting on, what else, an official government form, in triplicate of course, and turn it in to headquarters.  Unofficially we fill out certificates of sighting and present it to the person making the sighting, and a sticker for the sighting that gets put on the map hanging on the wall of the VC in the general area of the sighting.

The last cougar sighting was more than a month before we arrived at Big Bend.  Bears on the other hand are getting sighted frequently.  We were getting one sighting every two or three days at first but as the number of visitors increase with the beginning of the high season, sightings are now daily.

Most folks have a general idea of where they are when they see a bear, they usually know what trail they are on but can't pinpoint what part of the trail for the sighting record.  We usually put the sticker on the map about as far back in the woods as we can.  Today a group of folks came in pretty pumped up about seeing a bear with two cubs.  Actually they were concerned about one of the cubs.  It seems  they saw it fall out of some low branches of a tree and tumble down a bolder where it stayed and started bawling.  We asked them if they could show us on the map where they thought these bears were and the response was that they all pointed over our shoulder and out the back window of the visitor center!

They all said; "Come see!"  I grabbed the camera and followed them around to the backside of the visitor center and a few hundred feet down a trail that skirted a tee-pee shaped hill named Appetite Hill.  We don't know how it got that name, we keep asking but have not found anybody that knows.

When we got to where there was a clump of people standing and watching the sow and two cubs, the one cub had stopped making a racket and its mom was climbing back and forth between where the cub was and a shallow cave just above.

This is momma bear.  The noisy cub is behind her rear end and the other one is just up the hill in the shade of the shallow cave

This is the second cub.  Both cubs were a lot darker than mom.  Neither had been around long enough for the sun to bleach out some of the black yet.

After snapping a few pics I pulled the binoculars out of my pack to see if I could get a bead on what the noisy cub was up to.  I could see he had his front paws on something and was systematically putting his head down between his paws, biting and then pulling up.  Occasionally the cub would look up and shake his head, making his ears flap hard enough that we could hear it all the way down to where we stood. Once, the cub came out and stood on the boulder where his mother stood in the top picture.  With the binoculars I could see that his lower legs were wet and his claws were shiny from being wet with something.  Whatever it was, it was not water.  It was too viscous and had color to it.  By now a Ranger had joined us and I handed him the binoculars.  He could not make out what it was either.

We continued to get bear sightings this day and they were all coming from the hill out behind the VC.  Most folks were pretty happy about getting to see bears, some not so much.