Black bear sighting

100' or so.

Nice. First one I ever saw out there I was rounding a bend in a trail and it was rounding it as well coming at me. We met and were only about 20 feet apart. Just a quick stare down and I slowly walked backwards. It just went about it’s business.

I have a place for him if you can get him in your trunk. Oh, bring a couple girlfriends for him too. :-)

A couple years back, there was a bear that wandered down into the Micigan City area from Michigan. It was supposedly in Indiana for a couple of weeks.

About forty years ago, more or less, I was hunting in Owen County off Rattlesnake Road, and came across a beech tree with some strange scratch marks. They caught my eye because of their depth and regular parallel spacing in groups. Just seemed to be an unusual pattern to occur naturally, and the more I looked at them, the more curious it seemed.

The first explanation that popped to mind was that some other hunter had been trying to climb that beech or attach a stand, and had a lot of difficulty getting much past head high. Then I noticed that the tree had been "topped" at about twelve feet or so, apparently by nature (lightning. another falling tree ?) but not killed. No clues as to when, but the scratches looked to be newer than the height reduction. That added to my curiosity as it seemed to eliminate the reason tor anyone to be trying repeatedly to climb it with climbing spurs or a climbing stand. And the thought of bear claws did come to mind. Always enjoyed any nature shows I could catch at the movies or on tv, and I had seen the marks from bears said to be marking their territory and these looked to closely resemble them. Dismissed that idea pretty much because everybody knows we didn't have any bears running around in Indiana. But the suspicion did last.

I think it was my next trip to that area when I saw a UFO (unidentified furry object) about 200 yards away across the picked cornfield in that same hollow, walking through the woods on the opposing hillside. It was very black, and was shaped like a bear, and walked like a bear, but at that range and without binoculars, I couldn't make a positive identification.

I did tell another bowhunting friend about the sighting a few years later when we were waiting out a rainstorm sitting in my old Scout and got on the subject of odd things we'd seen hunting. He had seen what he felt pretty sure was a black bear in that same hollow a few years earlier, too! And he had asked around among other guys he knew who had hunted there and found a couple other similar "sighting reports" that had also never been officially reported. Nobody really wants to be the only guy who sees the flying saucer.

Not sure how accurate or how true, but someone had a picture of a black bear that was claimed to have been taken in Evansville.

2 years ago there was 2 that were taken out of Owensboro Kentucky and relocated to Tennessee.

I wondered about that.