Unsupported Speculation

I wanted to share some thoughts about meeting a bear in the woods yesterday. The experience has made me an overnight expert in the matter. Yesterday I did many things correct to avoid getting attacked, but there is room for improvement, and my next outing will be a bit cleaner.

First of all, I think that bear-bells, specifically the small ones you can buy on Amazon, are mostly useless. The market for these is to give people the equivalent of a magical charm that is less than $20 to snap to their bag, and it’s supposed to warn and ward away all bears, but it really only puts hiker’s minds at ease.

There may be a narrow and specific application for them, which is that when lots of hikers use them on an official trail, and all of these hikers abide by the rules to control their odors and never feed the bears, then bears that hear these small bells will know that it is a human that is not worthwhile.

In other words, it is a regularly trekked trail and humans abiding by strict rules that teach the bears around a trail a consistent lesson about what bell sounds mean.

But the rattler I made out of a camping cup seemed to only call a bear that didn’t have any idea what or who I was, which means bears are both fearless and curious. Having no previous learning that my sound meant a human of no use to it, it wasn’t scared away, but needed to check me out before deciding what to do.

Also, these small bear-bells on the internet do not make a sound that will travel very far. I think many people have this idea that bears have some sort of super-animal hearing, but the reality of sound is that high frequency noises don’t travel very far, much less so when they have low power, and that as the sound wave spreads out over a distance, then it is the same as the spreading beam of an old-fashioned flashlight, which can only cut through the darkness so far before what’s beyond it remains dark.

This is why I’m believing now that if you share the woods with bears, you are going to need to make LOUD noises. The greatest risk of one of these animals is that it only learns about you when you are near enough that it feels it needs to rush you to put you down quickly. This is why I think these small bells really won’t do the trick to ensure that the bear becomes aware of you at a sufficiently far enough distance.

The bear I met yesterday cut across sideways across the woods towards me, which I think means it was both confident but also cautious, and it wanted to get closer to get a really good look at me, but it did it in a way that was sideways so that it didn’t close the distance too quickly. It reminds me today of a skittish and slightly wild horse that will also run generally towards you sideways to check you out but still keep its distance.

The reason it became aware of me at a long enough distance is that it seems to have first heard me from about 350 feet away or so, and so to the bear I needed checking out, but it was unnecessary to rush me. And that’s because I was rattling a can inside a metal camping cup the whole time I was hiking towards the top of the mountain.

Additionally, I was checking maps of the mountain yesterday after I got back to try to estimate where I was when I met the bear, and it looks like I was about halfway to the top. More importantly, to the west in the direction where the bear came from, there was a stream marked where it apparently emerges from the mountain and flows downhill before converging with a creek in our area. This is why I think the bear was purposefully staying near this mountain stream in order to have plenty of water. Thus, be careful near remote sources of water.

Lastly, making loud enough noises through the woods will probably prevent most bear attacks, but there are always the few outliers. I’ve read it’s usually the case that with large animals, when they are having a more difficult time surviving, then they become more dangerous to people. If they are eating insufficient calories, then they are going to both be crankier and bolder in their attempts to procure food. Failing health also makes it harder for them to get this food, which means they’ll look for easier ways to find it to try to get out of their food and health crisis.

This is why I think that with bears that you need to keep tabs on whether it is a La Nina or El Nino year, as well as what the local drought conditions are. La Nina years will probably be the most dangerous time to live around bears, because these years will be hot and dry, and the various plant-based food sources will be growing more slowly and/or dying. El Nino years will be less dangerous, because there will be extra rain, and the plants will be growing food in more abundance.

2024 happens to be the first El Nino year of this slow back and forth cycle, and we’ve had plenty of rain, and the bear I saw seemed to be in the prime of its life and in good health, which is probably why it decided I wasn’t much of a concern for it, and that it wasn’t interested in getting any closer.

Local droughts of course mean that there is less plant-based food in the wilderness for bears to forage, and that means a more dangerous bear.

That’s basically the end of my analysis. I bought myself a large sports event cowbell, so I can avoid the snafu I had in the woods yesterday troubleshooting my camping cup rattler with a bear standing there on two feet watching me. I appreciate the bear’s patience, and I promise that next time I’ll bring a much more reliable piece of noise making equipment.