John, not sure I want to see any bears around here. They were frequent visitors at Mike's sister Bonnie's house in Bluemont and often came up on her deck at night. I wouldn't want to be seeing one sleeping in the goat building either LOL. In all the years we have lived here in the woods, we have never seen a bear. A few years ago we did see evidence of one though. The metal pole holding bird feeders and suet cages was bent down to the ground and the feeders and cages were destroyed. There were also claw marks in the bark of one of the trees. Must have just been passing through.
Funny story, when Mike's brother Lowell first moved in he brought his girlfriend's (now wife) cocker spaniel rescue with him. Riley was very skittish and scared of everyone, especially Mike. It took about two weeks for him to warm up to me, but it probably was a good two years or more before he would let Mike near him. One morning Riley had gone outside but with Mike being the last one to leave, he couldn't get Riley to come back in to the house. The weather folks were predicting ferocious thunder storms that day, so Mike finally decided to leave the garage door open and also the door from the garage into the house, hoping that Riley would come in once he was gone. At the end of the work day, I came home in that predicted thunderstorm and a wet, bedraggled, scared little cocker spaniel came running to me with obvious relief. We went into the house, I got dinner together, and generally putzed around for about an hour or so before Mike came home. When he went to toss his dirty clothes into the laundry room, he immediately did a quick back track into the kitchen wondering how long I had been home and had I not noticed a black bear sleeping in there??? Well, black bear was his first reaction but it was actually a very large black dog. Apparently it had run off scared in the storm, found the open doors into our house, and took shelter. My guess is that poor Riley was scared of it so that is why he was still outside in the rain when I came home. The dog didn't have a collar, but we started calling around with his description and someone knew who it was - belonged to a guy who lived 2 or 3 miles away!
