I recall seeing many videos of bears near the suburbs regions of different states and one bear in particular that was reported to break into several homes and wondered if it’s a new trend were seen or it’s been like that but only recently been given attention due to the media and technology advances. Can’t wait to hear your stories
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Saw a bear in the woods once. She saw me, we both walked away in different directions.
I’ve never seen a bear outside of a zoo.
I’ve had black bear in my campsite before. It was simultaneously awesome and slightly scary.
Anybody who finds themselves in the Eastern UP owes it to themselves to visit Oswalds Bear Ranch in Newberry. Where else can you toss apples to giant black bear?
Driving in rural western Virginia and we saw a bear on the road. We stopped for it about 30 feet away; we kept going when it left.
Backpacking in Maine and there were bear marks and fresh prints all over the trail –not really a close encounter, but as a 13 year old it felt way too close, especially when it got dark and I got separated from my group.
Was hiking in the UP and came about 100 yards or so away from a black bear, didn’t see it, but it saw us and we heard it. So we made an effort to make a little more noise and picked up our pace. Got the heart rate up!
I’ve spotted them in parks and forests. Not very often, but it happens. They’ll leave you alone as long as they don’t see you as a threat.
I mean, you still have to be careful, because they WILL brutally murder you if they think you’re a threat, so don’t do anything stupid to make them think you’re a threat.
I’ve had way too many close run ins with bears. I don’t think I’ve ever really been in danger, but I definitely haven’t always been able to keep recommended distances because circumstances just don’t always allow that. When I was a kid, I looked up and realized I was pretty close to a bear and her two cubs at Yosemite and learned that I have a strong “flight” response to fear. Not smart to run away, but in my defense, I was in kindergarten.
Then a couple summers ago, I had a similar situation where I rounded a blind corner and found myself face to face with a bear, maybe 6 feet away from it. I just turned around and went back. There’s one ice cream shop in the vacation town where most of this happened that just has an open trash can which is incredibly dumb, because of course bears will get into that and one night a bear just walked up to get to the trash can and was within a few feet of a friend who was in line for our group. The same bear then proceeded to spend the next hour rummaging through trash cans and couldn’t be scared away because it had gotten used to those sorts of attempts. The next summer, the open trash can was still there. In the same town, a bear recently just walked into the grocery store, selected a bag of chips from a display near the door and walked out.
From what I’ve heard, there’s some concern that the pandemic made bears bolder because they had a few years of a lot less human interaction, but for the most part, I think it’s just the kind of coexistence around bears that has always happened.
I see them from time to time when hiking in the mountains. Black bears are the only ones in my area, and they mostly keep their distance and just check you out from afar.
I do a lot of hiking and camping (35-40 nights a year) and I’ve only seen one bear – medium distance away on the AT near Tinker Cliffs in VA last year. It just ignored me and I kept going.
Chicago area here. There was some threat of Bears moving to the Aurora-Naperville area in the 1990s, but it never panned out. More recently, there’s been talk of Bears potentially showing up in Arlington Heights, though still unclear when that might happen. Either way, they remain unlikely to be a danger to anyone, and are usually sound asleep by the end of December.
We don’t get them very often but when we do, it makes the local news and [it’s pretty funny](https://youtu.be/Y5C2gihnEkE?si=v0cXkM_3zaPRJIgH)
I’ve been camping all over upstate NY, west TX, all of NM and northern CA for 40 years and I have *never* seen a bear in the wild.
In Spring the bears have a ravenous appetite after waking up from hibernating. So they often move into the suburbs with very little regard for human activity to try scavenge off people’s trash.
So lately I’ve been seeing maybe one or two a year just kind of wandering around. The good news is that everybody is scared enough of the bears to stay safe. The biggest threat is property damage because the bears get curious and start messing with people’s stuff. They’re strong as hell too so if they want to push your car around or tear down your awning it’s pretty easy for them to do so.
Not mine, but a good friend -slash- former hiking buddy.
“Former” here because … well, it’s related to the bear encounter and she’s not doing much hiking ever again.
Part of one of her solo hikes passed (relatively briefly) through a tourist camping area and she, eh, “didn’t share my opinion” that bears near tourist areas need to be treated with absolutely tippy-top high levels of caution.
A bear in the deep wild will almost always avoid you, unless there’s some special circumstance. For example if the best is starving at the end of an absolutely long winter. Most bears are legit more afraid of you than you are of them.
But bears in tourist areas can be a serious danger. Idiot campers leave their food out or (worse) actually feed the bears. DO NOT DO THIS.
Beard aren’t smart enough to make the mental distinction between “human giving me food” and “human is the food”, usually with radical consequences for everyone. Tragic for the human fur obvious reasons.
Tragic for the bear too, because rangers will almost always need to “remove” the bear if it’s gotten confused enough that it thinks if humans as a good source. “Removal” in quotes because it only sometimes involves moving a live best to a new habitat. Just as often, it’s removing a bear the ranger had to shoot.
I had a black bear sneak up behind me during deer season once. I was sitting under a tree looking down a hill about an hour before dark. I heard some rustling leaves behind me, I assumed it was a deer, looked over my right shoulder and the bear was within 10-15 feet of me, getting closer and crossing from my right to left. She walked right past me and went down the hill. I waited about 10 minutes and called it a day.
I also hit a bear in a tractor trailer in NY. Totalled my truck.
I’ve never seen one in the wild. The closest was when my dad’s beehives got destroyed by a bear, but all we found were tracks.
I was cycling up a climb in a national park with a friend. We saw a bear and it’s cub about 100ft up the road. we stopped, let them walk across. The my friend sprinted past the spot where we crossed and said the slow person would be bait for the bears…. nothing happened.
There are two local bears we catch on security cameras a couple times this year. They are black bears so not much bigger than a good size dog. They don’t cause any damage and hope they don’t get hit by a car .
no bears in my part of the country
See them on the reg.
Yes. At least once every couple of years. I live in the northern suburbs of Minneapolis, MN.
I was camping in Voyager National park when I was a teenager. One was less that 20 feet away. Thankfully was only interested in our sump hole ( where we would brush our teeth) as one of the other campers forgot to bury it.
The town we go camping in every year in the Adirondacks is known for black bears. Growing up, one of the evening attractions was to go to the town dump where you would see multiple bears combing through the garbage. The town has since converted the dump to a transfer station because of some NY state environmental legislation back in the 1990s I think so that’s no longer a thing but there used to be a dozen or so families most nights watching multiple bears. These days, there are still campers that don’t really believe the park rangers that there are bears around and they end up leaving food out after dusk while they sit around the campground at night. It is not uncommon to hear yelling and commotion as a bear wanders by and starts eating their doritos or whatever. The horrible consequences are that if a bear keeps coming around humans and eating food left out by irresponsible people, it will usually have to be euthanized. Last time I saw one in person was a few years back when we saw one nosing around near our car about 12 feet away from where we were sitting. Banged a few pots together and it ran away.
My wife and I ran into a grizzly with cubs in Wyoming, the bear huffed loudly and slammed her paws on the ground. We were scared shitless, I had bear spray on me but somehow dropped it trying to get it out. So we just turned around an ran, luckily the bear didn’t follow us.
There was a bear outside my school one day. We weren’t allowed outside that day, and I wasn’t allowed to walk home like I normally did. I had to take the bus.
My grandma had a bear they was constantly tearing up her bird feeders. Eventually it tried to get in the sliding doors so she shot it from her second story balcony.
I would drive by or see them in my sister in laws yard very often. They would go after her garbage if she didn’t close it all up correctly.
There have been sightings in a park near me recently.
That’s about it. They care not about me at all, nor do I care about them being there. Other than that I generally like the existence of wildlife.
I’ve had a bunch. They used to try to get into my feed shed (for my livestock) all the time when I lived in the mountains in Wyoming, and once did succeed. Never had one break into my house, but I also had like a million dogs to chase them off.
When I lived there, I probably saw them in my yard at least a couple times a month. They never really bothered us, though. Even my horses stopped really reacting to them.
Otherwise, I’ve seen them a lot from a distance while hiking and camping. And one time I was on a trail where I walked into a clearing and suddenly saw a black bear on my right…and two black bear cubs on my left, lol. The mother bear stood up and looked at me, and I just backed out of there being like, “It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you…” lol. She believed me apparently and everything was fine. That was my coolest/scariest bear encounter.
Most of my experience has been with black bears but I have spotted a couple grizzlies from a distance.
Used to live downriver from a major salmon hatchery when i was little. They were a constant presence on our property every spawning season.
Black bears were so common that they barely phased me as a child. My mother hated them though. You could use my mother screaming as an alarm in the spring because the bears were constantly coming to the kitchen window and “harassing” her.
It was the 80s, so my parent’s only allowed playing in the house if the weather was bad. Outside with the bears my sister and i would go to play. It is a small miracle nothing bad happened between the bears, the cougars and the rattlers.
Bears are extremely common in NNJ. They are not usually aggressive and aren’t really dangerous to people. I have seen a couple of them on trails, they just sauntered off
Nearly hit a fairly young one with a mountain bike when it stayed out of the brush across the trail at the last second.
Walked around the corner of a house and nearly ran into a large bear .
I’m in northeastern PA which is mostly woods, some farms, and scattered developments/small towns and see bears now and then but not as often as what their numbers would suggest.
I was in my chicken coup when a bear decided to take a seat against the door. I stuck my fingers through the gap to see what had trapped me inside and touched fur. The bear ate something and left. I waited about 15 minutes before peeking out of the coop and headed back to the house.
I get them in my neighborhood on a regular basis. They get into the garbage and make a mess kind of like a bigger version of a raccoon.
I shared an apartment with a large, hairy gay man for a while. That’s pretty much the extent of it.
There’s bars dedicated to bears, shirts optional and free pizza is passed around to keep the bears placated while they drink beer from the pitcher
Saw a black bear early in the morning on my way to work Friday. Had just raided a trash can (it was trash day) and when I drove closer it scooted off into the woods. Black bears are pretty common sights around my neighborhood (suburb of Seattle) because we’re so close to huge forest areas. Generally they are just spotted on security cams raiding trash cans and bird feeders at night, but seldom do people see them during the day nor do they usually cause any harm or risk to humans.
I live in Colorado at about 8400 feet/2560 meters elevation. Bears get into my goddamn trash at least a half dozen times a year, with incidents ramping up right before and after hibernation. It’s bad for the bears to see us as a food source AND super annoying to have to clean up yard trash, so we do our best to keep them out of it. They’re like giant raccoons, and just like raccoons…I love them and am secretly amused by their hijinks, even as I do my best to thwart them. (Don’t tell them I said that.)
Working at a scout camp in rural Virginia I happened upon a black bear after dark. I yelled some teenage profanity at it and the thing bolted off into the tress.
A few years earlier my group and I saw a small brown bear in while hiking in New Mexico. We moved back up the trail a few hundred feet, kept it in sight until the little dude wandered off.
I’ve seen or heard few others, but I’ve seen way more deer than bear.
I live about an hour from Boston and see bear on my security cam or walking about maybe 30 times a year.
On our town facebook page we often say something like “I’m near Johnson’s farm and a bear just walked though my yard”. That was if someone has their dog out they can make sure the dog doesn’t get hurt trying to go after a bear or a kid isn’t in the woods and surprises a mom with her cubs. Or to be outside near the chicken coop so they could scare the bear off. They really do a number on chickens and their pens around here.
We also are always asking about bear sightings about now and in the spring to figure out if they are in hibernation. Most people, trying to be responsible, take in their bird feeders so a bear doesn’t get to used to human contact. Bears love eating bird feed and a fed bear is a dead bear.
Some just asked but I saw one walk so I gave them a heads up they aren’t in hibernation yet.
We’ve got some amazing videos on my security cam of both teeny cubs playing and yearlings playing.
We really love them.
One time we were all outside and my kid was riding his bike and he was just around the corner of the house. And in a sing songy voice he said “bear”. I was like What? I thought it couldn’t have been bear because he’d have some sense of urgency since out dog was out loose in the yard with us. But it was. A bear walking down the street next to my kid riding his bike. I told my kid a bear could kill the dog if the dog wasn’t smart and to be more serious about bear sightings and treat it as a dangerous situation. He’s so used to seeing every kind of animal in the yard he doesn’t know a deer or bear could kill him.
He patted a porcupine once to see how prickly they were and I had read him the riot act about that.
There’s a great channel where a guy interacts with bears on the regular. Their favorite thing is the birdseed feeder above his porch. Wholesome as heck.
https://www.youtube.com/@PatrickConley
No close encounters but I saw a bear cubs paw prints in the snow once in East Tennessee
I’m in Michigan where bears are plentiful. I’ve only ever seen them in a zoo. A human is the only predator indigenous to the Americas that’s capable of killing an adult bear. The bears know this. They don’t want to be seen.
We have occasional black bears coming to visit our area. They usually come in to look for food (ie raiding gardens/garbage/chicken coops) then head back to the protected wetlands.
It’s usually at night, I’ve never seen one here daytime hours.
This is incorporated Snohomish County, Washington State here, near the city of Everett.
Iv seen bears lots of times. Grizzlies, brown bears, and black bears. Earlier this summer my cat was outside and I was in the wooded lot next door looking for her. All the sudden realized there was a bear about 40 feet from me. Ram in and grabbed my bear spray and then ran back out and was yelling at the bear. Luckily it was a black bear but a really big one. It started to wander off and I grabbed my cat as it tried to stalk the bear.
I was in a cabin with my wife my best friend and his pregnant wife. I went out late at night to have a cigarette. I noticed that the black labador retriever that had been running around the campground was near our now extinguished campfire. I went to pet it. Except it was a young black bear licking up the Pepsi my wife had spilled. I took a few steps back and the bear tried climbing a nearby tree. I went back in the cabin and said “you guys have to see this” we all went out CAREFULLY. The bear attempted to climb a different tree then decided to run off. I still get shit for trying to pat a bear.
This happened in Massachusetts at the Mohawk Trail state forest.
Had the dog out for a walk a few years back when we heard something moving in the weeds between the field where we were and the road. This was followed by the sound of a car hitting something, more rustling weeds, and a big black bear running out in front of us. It took one look at us and ran away, the coward.
To recap, we scared it into the road, it got hit by a car and shrugged it off, and then ran at the sight of a fat guy and his small dog. Of course, I had to stop the dog from trying to play with his new “friend.”
In New York, we dealt with black bears a bit. They weren’t really dangerous, more of an annoyance.