I awoke to the sound of breaking glass coming from outside my bedroom window. Even though it was 12:30 AM, I grabbed a flashlight and headed outside in the direction of the noise, towards my neighbors' house. I knew they were out of town, and I would have wanted them to similarly keep an eye on my place while I traveled. When I reached the end of my driveway, I could see a pair of bright eyes across the street reflecting the beam of my flashlight. On a slope below where my neighbors kept their trash bins, a bear was staring directly at me. And then it turned, climbed up the slope, and sauntered away down the street. Just a few weeks later, I would have an entirely different bear story that occurred very much closer - not a hundred feet away but a mere six feet from my front door.
My summer had begun several weeks earlier with lots of bear sightings in my Prescott neighborhood. There were stories of a big one that kept getting into garbage cans, like the one at my neighbors' home. There were other tales, one recounting a bear appearing in a security camera recording and another of a smaller, cinnamon-colored bear that crossed the street late one morning directly in front of residents out walking their dog. One afternoon I got a text from a neighbor about the same small bear ambling between her house and the one next door. I hurried over with my camera to check out the activity but was too late to catch a glimpse of the visitor.
I've seen bears in Prescott before, one as recently as two years ago as I ran on Javelina Trail almost three miles away in the National Forest. And five years before that, one crossed the trail ahead of me as I hiked up the Dandrea Trail below Mount Union, the second highest peak in the area. But I've never seen one in a well-traveled area like along a highway or in a crowded community like my own. The animals have always loomed as mysterious, secretive denizens of the deep woods. Or at least the bears did until recently.
On at least two occasions, I've awakened in Prescott to discover that the hanging suet cage for the birds had disappeared. Each time, I've found it lying in the dirt below the tree where it was hanging, pried open, devoid of any suet, the chain snapped that was connecting the container to a tree branch. The general consensus has been a raccoon had gotten into it, but no one has ever witnessed raccoons in the neighborhood. On one occurrence, I suspected a bear when I noticed a unique impression in the rain-soaked dirt. I couldn't actually call it a pawprint, but it looked similar.
After I interrupted the pilfering bear at my neighbors' place four weeks ago, I started bringing the suet into the house every night out of caution. But Wednesday night a week ago, I forgot all about it. Around 4:30 the following morning I awoke to the sound of my cat scratching in her litter box. But the noise was coming from outside, not from my bedroom's bathroom. The windows were wide open and the shades pulled up to let in the cool, nighttime air. In the early dawn light I could make out from my bed, a dark, moving mass in the alligator juniper tree off my deck. That scratching sound was a bear, and it was going for the suet!
I jumped out of bed and ran to the living room where I grabbed a flashlight and approached a sliding screen door leading to the deck adjacent to the commotion. The flashlight didn't shine through the screen so I couldn't tell if the bear was still in the tree. But I was loud as I fumbled to unlock the slider to exit the house and I soon heard the scared bear scurrying down the tree and into the yard. In the beam of the flashlight I watched the bear scamper away.
Much clearer images of the entire episode were awaiting my review on the brand-new outside security camera I had installed a few weeks earlier. I've not been concerned about crime as much as I was interested in watching the seasonal weather, flora, and fauna during the eight months of year I don't visit Prescott. Well the camera paid for itself when I soon discovered a video of the bear climbing the tree. A second video showed the bear quickly fleeing followed by myself running out onto the deck with a flashlight in hand.
Black bears populate most states in the union. In Arizona they prefer higher elevations, above 4,000 feet, where their habitat is usually forested. However, they are known to occasionally venture into the desert and even into the suburbs of our big cities like Phoenix and Tucson. And they are mostly solitary creatures that range up to fifty square miles in search of food. Until now, I've considered an encounter with them in the Prescott area as rare.
Record hot temperatures and record low rainfall this summer certainly aren't making it easy for the wildlife to survive in the surrounding forests. Our garbage cans and bird feeders are irresistible temptations for the bears at anytime let alone now. I saw the proof again when I passed an overturned bin in a neighboring community on my run just two days ago. I certainly won't forget to bring in the bird food at night anymore. But I'll keep my motion-activated camera on to see what other excitement it captures.
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| Frame from a security camera video of a black bear climbing a tree to get the bird suet at my home in Prescott. |
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| Frame from a video of a black bear at my home in Prescott. |
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| Frame from a video of a black bear at my home in Prescott. |
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