Wedding & Honeymoon – Medium-Ass Black Bear!
October 18, 2009
After hiking to see the Largest Tree On the Planet (pics to follow) in Sequoia National Park, we waited in a line of cars for a Pilot Car (kinda like Chasing, eh!). We noticed some deer off maybe 80 feet at roughly 2 o’clock (pics to follow).
They were content to graze for a few minutes, but then they seemed a little agitated and moved away swiftly. A couple of minutes later Michelle looked up and said, “Oh My God – a Bear!”.
She had the 50D with the superb 70-200 F4 IS lens and promptly got off a series of shots with the Bruin bear (EDIT: turns outs the term ‘Bruin’ only applies to the Brown Bear, and our friend here is a brown Black Bear) quietly foraging about 50 feet from us at about 4 o’clock:
Apparently a lot of the Yosemite bears are night bears (an adaptation to all the human activity and associated increased opportunities for food availability) and have been ear-tagged (the more natural behavior for the black Bear is day-activity and most of these are not ear-tagged).
Looks like this might be one of the more non-adapted specimines – nice shot sweetie!
October 28, 2009 at 3:17 am
Err… dude… that looks like a grizzly – it’s brown!
October 29, 2009 at 1:58 am
It turns out that the Black Bear can be brown, and the Black Bear range includes California (the Brown Bear range, with the Grizzly being a subset of the Brown, extends only down as far as Yellowstone/the Tetons).
Nonetheless, we thought it was an impressive bear. I wonder if he was upwind from us as he paid no attention to us or the other cars in the Pilot Car line. I believe he left when others started to notice him and weremaking noise by getting out of their cars.
October 29, 2009 at 2:40 am
Grizzly’s are more dangerous than Black Bears if you rile them, but black bears are more likely to hunt people for food.