Yeah, the headline got your attention. Admit it — you’re curious. Or I guess you could be thinking that maybe, just maybe, the combination of isolation and wood smoke has, at last, driven me to madness.
I can assure you that I’m fine. I maintain a firm grip on reality.
As regular readers know, Deb and I have put out trailcams here and there on our property, both for security and to watch resident wildlife. One camera, which we’ve tagged “Mountain Two,” sits about 85 yards upslope from the cabin, toward the summit.
This is the typical view from Mountain Two:
The Stealth Cam app sends us a notification whenever motion triggers the camera to record activity. We set it up to take still images, six at a time, around the clock.
When we woke up this morning, we had a notification that something had caused Mountain Two to wake up shortly after 4am. This is the first of six photos it took:
Nothing, right? Must’ve been a falling leaf or something.
Look again:
Well, I’ll be damned — WTF is that?
It’s not unusual for these trailcams to capture only the southern exposure of a departing northbound animal — a whitetail, for example — at the edge of the first frame or two. Pretty common, actually.
I cropped and enlarged and massaged that section of this photo the best I could.
That’s no deer. It’s black, lower and stockier. Not a hog, either. I want to say it’s a dog, mostly to resist jumping to wilder conclusions, but I don’t think so — the only black dog that size ’round here, as far as I know, is Deb’s cousin’s Newfie, and she spends her nights indoors.
As much as I’m trying not to “go there,” especially with nothing but a blurry image of hairy hind quarters to inform me, I can’t deny my suspicion.
It’s a black bear.
We know they’re here, though that’d be the first bear we’ve seen in 18 months. As a matter of fact, we’ve caught them before on this very same trailcam.
Still, you have questions.
Isn’t that trailing leg too slender to belong to a bear? I thought the same thing, so I searched the wwWeb for images of a black bear walking. The gait is a match. And the hind leg could be, too, especially if ours is a younger bear.
It’s mid-December — aren’t bears hibernating by now? Not in Ozarkansas. Black bears typically don’t begin retreating to their winter dens ’til January in this part of the country. They come out for good in April, about a hundred days later.
All of our sightings (so far) have been in June.
Anyway, I’m gonna say with 80% certainty that Mountain Two snapped a picture of a young black bear this morning. I may be wrong about that, but an educated bear-ass guess costs me nothing.
(I reserve 20% doubt to account for the possibility that the Newfie was loose.)
I’m posting early today, because this evening I’ll accept Deb’s invitation to join her and her co-workers for their Christmas get-together. Some restaurant up in Bull Shoals. Dutch treat. It’ll be late when we get back to The Mountain.
We’ll pick up here again tomorrow. Probably.
The view from our driveway, looking southwest, at sundown yesterday.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB