Black bear

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When we went to Canada, I didn’t expect to have an encounter with a bear.

It’s one of those things, isn’t it? You think, oh my gosh, wouldn’t it be amazing to see that? But the country is so vast and you just never know with nature whether something’s going to happen.

And we were very fortunate that, beside some cabins that we were staying in, a couple used the wifi of the cabin owners and they were sat in the car and said, oh, well, you know, you guys on holiday we got chatting and they offered us the opportunity, if we wanted to, to drive up and down their driveway, onto their ranch and they suggested either doing it before sunrise, and just after, and then the similar thing with sunset, so kind of before sunset and just after.

So we had had a very relaxed day. after a big, big day the day before and decided to hop in the car at sunset and see what we could, could find. This was our first attempt at doing this, and as we drove up the driveway in the distance, we could see this black bear. And it was beautifully framed by the autumnal plants in the background that had all gone to seed, to that kind of wispy, kind of framing, I think really helped it, to see the bear in the landscape, because it was otherwise quite well, camouflaged.

And as we parked up again, we stayed inside the car, like I’ve mentioned with some of the other encounters with nature. Keeping everything inside the car means your car acts as a hide and the animals don’t tend to then get disturbed by the car being there. It’s only when we put our arms out with cameras and that kind of thing that can cause, disturbance and then obviously for them to move away.

So, yeah, we were in the car watching it and it was such a still night and we could actually hear it crunching the grass and the vegetation that it was eating. And it was just absolutely spectacular just to sit there in that moment that was so almost meditative. The the smell of all of the woodland and the pines that were around, and then just hearing this bear moving around and crunching through things.

And it started to move away, and it looked like it was going down the driveway behind where we come onto the ranch. And so my friend, that was with us and was like, oh, we’re going to miss it. He pressed the, the boot button and then the boot starts to lift up on this car.

But what I was then really worried about was like, what if it doesn’t go back down? What if it’s only open. And we have some food in the boot because we’d been to the store, to stock up. So I was thinking, oh my gosh, what if that gets because I think it was downwind, but what if this bear gets a whiff of the food and our boots wide open?

Like, is it just going to jump in? Yeah, it was a panic moment. And also we’d been sat there for about maybe half an hour watching it. So I’m thinking like, oh gosh, what if the battery just suddenly decides that that’s it on standby. And then these boots wide open with this bear coming to join us.

Alas, that didn’t happen. It continued where it was going but it was an absolutely amazing encounter for the time that we had. I love the fact that we had about half an hour watching it. It just made it so immersive and so, so special just to really be in its presence, and soak that in for a little while, rather than it just being a fleeting moment where some things can be in nature. So it was just such a special, special thing.