A Bear In A Small Pool
September 18, 2020 11:08 PM   Subscribe

 
Exactly what I needed this morning, which feels like the morning after Trump got elected. I can't do news or fb or so many things. Today is bear and cat videos for internet consumption.
posted by caddis at 3:51 AM on September 19, 2020 [9 favorites]


In that case, please allow me to shamelessly promote my previous bear video FPP.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 4:22 AM on September 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


Yay! I both love bears and am exceedingly glad they aren't commonly spotted in my town. Some of my favorite hiking memories are spotting black bears (from a distance, on the other side of the creek, minding their own bug- and berry-eating business). Adorable destruction machines. And for anyone who somehow hasn't heard of it, we are coming up on Fat Bear Week, and those bears don't know or care about COVID or politics or anything but eating salmon, and are the best.
posted by bowtiesarecool at 6:00 AM on September 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


I hope that Takoda and the rest of the animals at the Oregon Zoo are okay in the wildfire smoke. I am worried that they are not.
posted by pinochiette at 7:40 AM on September 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


Wonderful!

(I just realized that bears’ seeming clumsiness is simply because their general roundness affords them additional modes of locomotion.)
posted by sjswitzer at 8:38 AM on September 19, 2020


This is the best. I just saw my first wild bear a month ago and it was THE BEST THING. This is the next best thing, and I'm so glad they were able to bring Takoda into captivity where he still looks pretty satisfied with life, instead of finding other ways to deal with a people food-loving bear.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:33 AM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


I am delighted to inform you that Takoda the splashing bear is a pandemic denialist.
posted by CynicalKnight at 11:21 AM on September 19, 2020 [2 favorites]


I just saw my first wild bear a month ago and it was THE BEST THING.

In this video, from a safe distance, I joyfully feel the bear's humanness. Unexpectedly encountering a bear outdoors at 10-20 meters is a different experience. In close encounters, I've had a sense that the bear is assessing my bearness. I seem to have been deemed a weird looking bear and permitted to go about my business.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:37 AM on September 19, 2020 [4 favorites]


awwwwwww
posted by doctornemo at 11:37 AM on September 19, 2020


I feel refreshed, and it was the bear that got the swim!
posted by Goofyy at 12:54 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


i love this bear so much. i love that he is in the paw spa, splashing happily.
posted by zdravo at 2:18 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


Videos like this make it feel so right and proper that dogs and bears share a branch of the family tree.
posted by needs more cowbell at 4:17 PM on September 19, 2020 [3 favorites]


dogs and bears share a branch of the family tree.

thank you for confirming what I've always suspected but have been too lazy to look up or prove:
cats : lions :: dogs : bears
or in plain English:
bears are just really big dogs!
posted by martin q blank at 5:13 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]


From needs more cowbell's link
At one time, the Hyaenidae (hyenas) were included, but genetic testing has shown them to belong in Feliformia, instead.
I didn't know that. I thought they were big members of the weasel family.
posted by jamjam at 5:41 PM on September 19, 2020


It looks like hyenas are (relatively) closely related to mongooses, though! And mongooses look similar to weasels even though they're not closely related (weasels are in Caniformia along with bears and dogs, mongooses are in Feliformia). So...maybe that?
posted by needs more cowbell at 6:46 PM on September 19, 2020


The thing that's always weird about bears is how much they look like humans in bear suits, at least the smaller ones. I think that scrambles our responses to them, and maybe theirs to us.
posted by emjaybee at 10:47 AM on September 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


This guy was not so interested in the pool.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 11:16 AM on September 20, 2020


The top comment on YT at the moment is:

Man that bear has the meaning of life figured out.

v View 42 replies
posted by asok at 2:01 PM on September 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


v View 42 replies

I love it when I open up a reply thread for a perfectly innocuous comment and get dropped at the end of a completely unrelated flame war, and just try to imagine how one led to the other. Like:

JoeSchmoe: Cute doggies!!! <3
(See 32 previous comments)
DankKillr42069: have you ever played a game that requires real skill or does your mom still change your diapers for you
posted by J.K. Seazer at 7:02 PM on September 20, 2020


Grizzly bears are incredible creatures, but I think that we underrate black bears because they are mostly harmless doofs that are very curious and like to war trash. Obviously I do not want to have any extremely close encounters with bears but I would be relatively ok with a black bear nosing around the garbage bins while a grizzly would mean it was time to pack up my possessions and move.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:06 PM on September 20, 2020 [1 favorite]


Is it time for more bear stories? I feel like it might be time for more bear stories.. It has been
0 days
since my last encounter with a black bear.

Bears are a part of life here in Alaska and, as others have noted, there's a big difference between Ursus americanus and Ursus arctos. On the SE Alaskan island on which I live we have the smaller, mellower, less terrifying black bears. Which is not to say one should treat them without respect or caution. But it is significantly less likely that a black bear will see you as food.

Anyway, in Ketchikan, where I live, our terrain is quite steep and in the historic part of town many of the official city "streets" are not paved roads but are actually publicly maintained wooden staircases that serve multiple dwellings that are built on hillsides too steep for a road. My home is located on such a "street", and we've had a sharp increase in bear activity on the stairs this summer. We've become enough of a travel corridor that Fish & Game installed a wildlife camera in the side yard between the neighbor's house and mine as part of a study on urban bear behavior, and now when I leave the house and don't expect to come back until after dark I take a flashlight with me so that I don't have a repeat of a previous experience year's experience when, coming home from a card game with friends (in the pre-Covid days) I discovered, climbing the stairs in the dark, that while I was about halfway up, there was a bear coming from the top who was about 1/3 of the way down. If you ever need a great way to get your heart beating I can recommend being surprised in the dark by a stair bear as one of the better ways I know to test the old ticker.

My favorite bear-about-the-house story from recent years (as opposed to older material) was from (I think) last summer. The carver who was renting an apartment from me downstairs would often work in the summer with his door and windows open, taking periodic breaks to go out and cool off on the downstairs porch and enjoy the night air. He swears up and down that one night, taking a break from intently working on a carving, he walked out onto the porch to find a bear sitting quietly on the edge of the deck, looking up at the stars. I have suspected a bit of poetic license in this story but can't rule out that it may have happened exactly as he describes. The bears are curious about everything else, I guess, so I don't know why they wouldn't be curious about the heavens as well..
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:51 AM on September 22, 2020 [1 favorite]


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