Another bear saunters by

Eating dinner out on the deck this evening brought another bear sighting.  This fellow was larger, with an ear tag, so wasn't the younger fellow of a couple of days ago.

He checked out (the empty) bird feeder, poked around a bit, and headed up the ravine (towards town). 

I hope he turned around and headed back down, towards more woods and the larger neighborhood...

So this is the 4th bear sighting in our urban Western NC site.

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A young bear helping himself

A morning fuss from Woody (our Golden retriever) had me looking from the deck (what was he barking so vigorously about?)

It turned out to be a young (presumably) male black bear, quite small, who was helping himself to the black oil sunflower seeds in the feeder.

According to our neighborhood list-serve, he must have just been wandering through our end of the neighborhood.  We're close to downtown, so don't normally get visits. 

This is just the third bear we've seen in 7+ years.  They've all involved the bird feeder -- so no seeds for a while...  He was so small, I just let him eat the seeds, without doing too much shooing away.

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