Tag: black bear

Black Bear

Cinnamon Black Bear, Yellowstone National Park

Photo of cinnamon black bear.
A Hungry Bear

I started this photo blog a little over a year ago in Yellowstone.  I thought then that it would be a good time to start the blog because I would have, hopefully, a lot of images to get the blog going.  As it turned out I got more images than I could deal with.  By the time I got all the images downloaded each night it was 11:00 pm and I wanted to be back in the park by sunrise.  No problem I thought.  I’ll post the Yellowstone images on the blog when I get home.  I was going to do that to some degree anyway.

As it turned out, when I got home I started going to nearby Point Reyes National Seashore and, to my surprise, there were enough wildlife photo opportunities at Point Reyes that I never did post much of last spring in Yellowstone.   I cancelled my trip this spring which would have been my third spring trip in a row.  I started posting images of spring in Yellowstone a week ago without much thought about it.  I guess I missed being there.  I think I’ll continue for a while.

This cinnamon black bear was a regular outside the northeast entrance last spring.  I don’t know where the boundary is between Park Service land and Forest Service land. To me, he’s a Yellowstone bear.

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Killing Black Bears and Selling Their Gall Bladders

Photo of mother black bear.
Black Bear, Yellowstone National Park

Recently I wrote that the elk are dropping their antlers in Point Reyes National Seashore and the Park Service is busy picking up the antlers before the antler traders find them and remove them (which is illegal).  I mentioned that while bad enough, at least the antler thieves don’t kill the elk for the body parts as happens with animals such as bears, tigers and elephants.  The next day I opened my local paper to learn that someone in my city, which is located not more than 30 miles from San Francisco, was arrested while poaching a black bear in the Mendocino National Forest.  More black bear parts, namely a head, five paws, a penis and gall bladder, were in his freezer at home.  According to the article, black bear gall bladders sell for $5,000 on the black market.  A bad as these killings are, the real problem is the demand by some in the Asian community for bear and tiger parts for their supposed value as aphrodisiacs.  Tigers are nearing extinction due to this demand.  I wonder if there has ever been any study to support or refute this belief.

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Life Is Not Perfect and that Includes Yellowstone

THis cinnamon-colored black bear has something wrong with its left elbow. He can't straighten it.
Cinnamon Black Bear, Yellowstone National Park

Yesterday was a good day for bear sightings.   I saw seven black bears and one grizzly.  One of them I know I saw and photographed before because he has a something wrong with his left front leg.  It seems the elbow is locked.  Sometimes he puts it and his whole foreleg on the ground when he walks and other times he puts just his paw on the ground.  Either way he is unbalanced with that locked elbow.  When he goes downhill he just raises his left foreleg and sort of “hops” downhill.

This is the second animal I’ve seen in the last week with a significant problem.  The other was a cow bison with calf.  The cow never put her left hind leg on the ground.  If a grizzly goes after her calf she won’t be able to move well enough to try to fend the grizzly off.

Life can be tough.  I hope they both make it.