Thursday - June 27, 2013

Rural Life

So I went and got my chest X-ray. The radiologist is just a couple miles away, right on our local North-South county highway. It’s not a wooded area, but it is adjacent to a good sized farm on the back end of the Exxon-Mobile corporate park. A housing development backs up to their parking lot, and in front we’ve got the town traffic court and Sheriff’s office, with the poor recruits out doing PT in the parking lot on this hot and sweaty day.

So I go in the driveway, and see two deer chewing away on the lawn. Nothing special there; deer are like lawn ornaments around here. Everybody has half a dozen.

Get the X-ray. It’s easy. Except they made me wear pasties. WTH? Little stick on nipple covers. Beats me, but whatever.

All done, I walk out the door. And come to a dead stop. There’s a bear in the parking lot.

Ok, he wasn’t quite in the parking lot, he’s moseying along the back fence under the trees. But it was a bear. A black bear. And while he wasn’t BearZilla, he wasn’t a little cub. His back was as high as the bottom of the driver’s window of a Tacoma 4x4 pickup. About 4 feet, maybe 4 1/4? I’d guess about 350lb, but I’m no bear judge. His ears looked tiny, so I knew it wasn’t a cub, and he had some white fur alongside his nose. An adult. So I just stood there for a few seconds, not moving. And he snuffled his way along. At which point I veeeeery smoothly got in my car, quietly closed the door, and decided (heat be damned!) that, yeah, I think I’ll roll up the windows. And lock the doors.  A little frightening, a bit unusual, but really nothing that out of the ordinary around here. I’m living in Wild Kingdom.

Wikipedia and other web sources of ... the bear facts ... somehow don’t take NJ and eastern PA into account. “The typical black bear, Ursus americanus americanus, is typically 150-300lb”. Yeah right. And every year, hunters bag ‘em right on the other side of the border, weighing in around 600, 700, 800lbs. We grow our bears extra large. As big as a sofa, chest high, with claws on. But mellow. That’s a Jersey bear.

I keep saying that I’m never going to leave the house without one of my digital cameras, but somehow I always do. One of these days, I’ll actually get pictures of all the crazy stuff around here, from the fighting deer to the blimps doing a turn around right overhead to the hot air balloonists landing in the back yard to the pair of nested red-tailed hawks having aerial skirmishes with a big flight of turkey buzzards. And our Peeping Tom Cat, a scrubby little moggy who comes by every day or so and sits outside the kitchen slider, staring at us like we owe him money or something.

http://www.nj.com/hunterdon-county-democrat/index.ssf/2013/05/active_bears_in_nj_prompt_warnings_from_officials.html#incart_river
http://www.nj.com/hunterdon-county-democrat/index.ssf/2013/05/bear_sighted_in_clinton_townsh.html
http://www.nj.com/bergen/index.ssf/2013/06/bears_found_in_ridgewood_likely_from_same_litter.html
http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2013/06/at_least_two_black_bears_spott.html

Posted by Drew458     on 06/27/2013 at 02:29 PM   
Filed Under: • Animals •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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