Last year in October I observed a black bear in Lake Lure. Yesterday I returned to the same place and saw bear footprints. How likely is it to be the same bear?
1 Like
Last year you saw a bear cub and this year you see small (?) footprint, I think it could be likely the same bear.
2 Likes
According to the US National Park Service, a Black Bear’s individual home range is typically 15 sq. mi. (Other sources give different figures.)
And apparently they frequently use game trails and man-made trails, so maybe it is regularly using one of those?
1 Like
my understanding is black bears are creatures of habit and often do visit the same area multiple times, especially if there’s something such as a good food source that appeals to them. That plus their large range as noted above does suggest this may be the same bear.
1 Like
In camera trapping, one often sees what looks like the same bear in the same pose at the same location at the same time of day, months apart. They patrol their territory returning to places where they remember food. I believe it was @beartracker who said that they often put their feet in the exact same spots.
1 Like
I think it’s very likely, then, that this was the same bear. But he couldn’t have put his feet in the exact same spots. What now is mud where I saw footprints (likely obliterated now by the construction crew) was last year a paved driveway. The nail whose current coordinates are on the observations was moved sideways 48 mm and down 37 mm by grading, which resulted in the house being shifted sideways by a few centimeters from where it was supposed to be.
1 Like
I agree with others who have said that it is possible that the same bear will visit the same place, especially if the bear has learned to find food at a particular location. Brown and black bears also make use of terrain that makes travel easier, so they use the same trails and travel corridors. There’s a spruce tree near my home that a bear(s) visits and marks at least once a year. It could be the same bear, but it may not be either.
In general, brown and black bears aren’t strictly territorial. They live within overlapping home ranges. Different bears will use the same places. In this sense, they share space with other bears, even if they sometimes make efforts to exclude other bears from certain places. This can be true of even individuals who are intolerant of each other. In that situation, the less dominant bear may simply avoid the more dominant individual by visiting a location when the more dominant bear is not present. You may have found evidence of the same bear or two different individuals. Neither option would be surprising.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.