Ursus Americanus

After an amazing lunch over at Grandpa and Grandma's, we headed up to the hill. We called to see if Chris and Jill wanted to come up, which they did. Jill and Gabriella stayed in the cabin and relaxed. I don't hold it against Gabriella for not coming out in the woods. It would take her forever to cover any ground. Five month-olds. Haha.

Anyway, we headed into the cedars and split up. Stephanie was up for a couple days and her and mom went together for the first part of the walk. Chris and I walked about 30 yards apart from each other in the cedars. After about 15-20 minutes, I came across a skull. I thought it was a deer skull, which wouldn't be anything too out of the ordinary, but when I turned it over, I saw the molars were way too big. You might think I'm an idiot, but half of the top part of it was gone, deteriorated or something, but just not there. Also, the canine teeth were missing, which would've been a giveaway. I realized it was a bear skull. It was definately a small bear, maybe a yearling. I walked over towards Chris and showed him. It was the first bear skull I'd ever found. We continued on walking and after about 5 more minutes, i saw another skull that was sitting upside down and was in good condition. I knew right away that this was another bear skull. This was pretty weird to find my first two bear skulls 75 yards from each other. Both of which were small (yearling) cub skulls. My theory is that they were old enough to make it into hibernation, but if mom was killed or something, they may have left the den in search of food and just didn't make it. Or they were both shot and left, but there wasnt really any place to sit and hunt back there. On this leg of our walk, Chris and I also came across the biggest deer droppings I've ever seen. Now that might now fascinate many people, but when you've seen as much deer poop as I have, and suddenly some sticks out as enormous, it's strikes me as interesting. But we kept crossing it and so that kind of let us know a general area of travel or time spent by, what I think was, an older deer - probably a buck. Eventually, we met up with mom and Steph and made our way to the Little Hill.

We all walked south towards the road and weaved in and out of good deer trails from the early winter. We popped out 100 yards from the road and decided it was getting too wet. Oh, by the way, Christopher didn't have water boots on. By this point, he's absolutely soaked up to his knees. Poor guy. Anyway, we turned East and curled back north, trying not to cover our same tracks. We headed north-northeast back towards the three corner. We saw a lot of rubs and buck sign from november, but nothing as far as antlers.

I'm betting most of my money that for whatever the reason, the deer spent most of their time in the cedar swamps. Both at the Hill and at the Refuge. I might get out a couple more times before green up, but you can bet I'll stick near the edges of the cedars.