Reading Trees to Track Black Bears: Part 1

Reading Trees to Track Black Bears: Part 1
We are Nick and Valerie Wisniewski on behalf of expertvillage.com. We would like to talk about bear signs and if you need more information, please visit us at our website at walnuthilltracking.com. In particular, we would like to look at this tree and interpret the bear sign that we find here. The first thing we see are some claw marks. We have already looked at it closely and we see there are five claw marks and it is a large robust animal that could not be anything but a bear. The question is was it marking behavior which is a form of communication; was it climbing the tree to escape from a predicator namely a human being or was it some kind of feeding behavior. If we follow the tracks up, we are actually going to see that they continue a path, their head height, and continue up 15 to 20 feet up the tree indicating bear climbed the tree. The question then becomes what did he climb the tree for? This tree is not known to be a food source for bears except on this branch which was broken by a bear and we can tell it was broken, it was not wind damaged or storm damaged because of the bite marks and the twisting of the limb that would not occu5r in a storm or naturally. A bear bit that, hung on there and twisted it off until it broke. The clues following the branch up are here. There was at one time a bird feeder hanging here and the bear climbed the tree to get the bird feeder. Although bears do prefer wild food by a wide margin to human food they will not resist something like a bird feeder hanging from a limb especially early spring and they are hungry after a winter of hibernating. Human beings are moving into bear areas in greater numbers. In order for the bear to survive, it is important that we learn to understand their behavior.