Bear Sightings

There was a photo on Facebook the other day of a young black bear that had been killed on the highway just up the road.  By his size he looked like a yearling: smallish, maybe the size of a really big dog.  Glossy black fur, rounded ears, he looked very sad and vulnerable lying on the side of the road by the Baptist church. 
I absolutely dread hitting a critter.  Almost worse than killing them is injuring them and causing pain that I can't fix. It's tempting to carry a pistol just to be able to put some poor thing out of its pain and misery.   Deer, elk, bears, raccoons, opossums, the list is endless up here for road casualties.   
On the lighter side, bears do come through our yard.  We've kept what's called a wildlife corridor down by the water, so that bears, deer and such can move under cover from the wooded wetland north of us to the one south of us.  Of course, they have to negotiate the road in front of our house.   Few of them are willing to go through the water conduit that passes under the road.  It's plenty big, but even mother ducks will risk the road instead.  Not sure why.  Maybe because it's contained and close. 

We've had to move the bird feeders in our yard to high branches of the trees.  One night I woke up about three a.m. for some reason and wandered out to the living room.  The motion light for the front was on so I looked out to see two bears trying for the bird feeders.   One was reaching his ultimate yoga stretch up, the other was trying to climb out on a too-thin limb.  First I raced in and woke my husband, scaring him half to death.  I didn't want him to miss it.  Then I got two pans, opened the front door and banged them together and yelled.  That did the job.  It made me feel kind of bad - food is hard work for bears up here.  But they can become total nuisances if you feed them.  They start bringing friends and family to the feast.  One retired couple farther north was spending  a fortune feeding a bunch of bears, plus all the neighbors were mad at them.  They couldn't go out in their yards for fear of encountering one or several.  Fish and Wildlife put a stop to it.  
My friend was golfing on the course north of here and saw a mother and cubs at a distance on the isolated 8th hole.  She left her ball and headed out of there.

I guess if there's a point to this, it's that this really was the bears' territory first.  They can be scary nuisances, but they're trying to make a living too.  We leave precious little for them sometimes.  If you weigh several hundred pounds and eat berries, you're going to need to roam a bit to find enough to get by.   My plea is that we don't just immediately decide to kill them.  Sometimes that 's the only sad solution, but avoiding creating a problem in the first place can be effective.  No garbage, no dog food, no bird seed, it just takes awareness and we can continue to share the earth for awhile longer.