September 25
Woke up to a chilly morning…but, then again, when isn’t it anymore up here? So, we made our coffee and tea and had breakfast in the warmth of the bed…then got ourselves up and ready to go.
All of our traps on Spruce Creek were tripped, so I decided we needed to check our Red Meadow site, first. Nothing there, so we headed onto Spruce Creek. We checked the culvert, first, and, sure enough…there’s a grizzly in it…a big grizzly. I checked our receiver to make sure it wasn’t the female the caught the other day, and it wasn’t…so this was a new bear. It was awfully big and more aggressive, so we started thinking it was a male…as we got a closer look at it, I was pretty sure I saw its peetie…so, we gave Tim a call to let him know we had a bear and that we would run the rest of our traps and give him a call. Tim sounded pretty pooped after taking care of bear calls in town, so I suggested to him that, since I was 95% sure it was a male, maybe we could just kick it loose? Tim said, naw, he’d come up and see if we could glean some info off of it.
So, we ran the rest of our traps…our other two snares on Spruce Creek were an odd situation. The “trail set” wasn’t tripped…the transmitter had simply been knocked enough to be giving off a different signal…but the “cubby” had been hit…and everything was gone…the spring, the transmitter…and the snare…hmmmm. Well, I looked around and found the spring and the transmitter, but the snare was a mystery. See, we wrap and secure the snare around a tree, so when the bear gets snared, it’s fastened to a big tree so it can’t get away. I ALWAYS make sure the snare is wrapped and secure on the tree…cuz if it isn’t and a bear gets snared…well, you don’t want a bear walking around with a 6 foot snare on it…since the other end of the snare could get caught on something and the bear could die from that. So, this was just a nightmare…we toyed with the idea that someone had sabatoged it…but that didn’t seem likely. Of course, this probably happened at night when the camera didn’t catch it. So, that put a pretty big damper on my day that I possibly have caused a bear to be walking around with a snare on its foot. D kept reassuring me that he was CERTAIN the snare was fastened to the tree…but the fact of the matter was that the snare was gone and it was probably on a bear’s foot…the REAL pisser about it was that, since the snare is probably on a bear…we had a bear snared…if it was fastened to a tree…we would have gotten another bear! Damn!
The rest of our traps were clear…we got hit at one of our Coal Creek sites…so, we headed back up and met up with Tim and we took him to the Spruce Creek cubby, first, to show him the missing snare and he said, “Well, let’s re-set and see if the bear comes back.” Well, this site, D and I really think is snake-bit and we both baulked at resetting that cubby…I gave up on it long ago and it became D’s cubby…but now he was starting to hate it, too…so we went through the whole, “Do you want to set it?” “No, do you want to set it?” “No.” Finally, Tim said, “Do you want me to set it?” SURE!!!! So, Tim did the snare while I fixed up my trail set to see if the bear that was outsmarting us could be outsmarted.
We then went on to the Spruce creek culvert to the trapped bear. Well…bears that are trapped in a culvert trap make the most mournfull cries…it just breaks my heart. We looked at the bear a little closer and could see that it had busted off a bunch of its claws…which just looks painful. We got a good look at it and confirmed that it was a he…and Tim just wanted some hair from him for DNA…the three of us kinda hated the idea of having to drug the bear just to get hair for DNA, so we spent some time trying to get the bear’s butt to one end of the culvert…but, he wouldn’t cooperate…he put himself in the middle of the culvert and wouldn’t move…poor guy was just shaking and crying…so, we tried to tip the culvert to slide him to one side, but he just splayed his paws to keep himself from slipping.
We were getting to the point of thinking we had no other choice but to drug him, when Tim wondered if the claws that had broken off would have enough tissue to glean some DNA from…I agreed that they would have to have some tissue in them and that we could just collect them and set him free. While we were having this discussion, the bear was trying to hide from us…seriously…he kept picking up his back paw and putting it over his eyes as it he could just hide from us and it would all be over. Broke my heart…but it made me feel so good that we weren’t going to have to drug him and stress him anymore…so, we set our trucks up and hooked up a rope system to the trap and used the truck to pull the trap door open and off he went…sore toes, for sure…but free and not drugged. He was a big, older bear…in good health…
After he took off, we re-set the culvert and let Fancy jump all over the culvert trap smelling the bear and barking her little tail off. She loved it. We transferred some bait from Tim’s truck to ours and set Tim free, too…poor guy has been running ragged with bear calls. We then ran down to our Coal Creek sites again to re-set the one and D wanted to take one of the cameras down, too…we then went home. On our way home, we listened to the Spruce Creek sites and the trail set was tripped. I’m assuming it’s just that I knocked the transmitter when I was setting up some logs around the set. Probably nothing.
Dinner and reading and to bed and do it all again tomorrow.
D got some great pictures…but…he didn’t download his chip right…or didn’t save it right…or something…so…we don’t have any pictures…but if we did…there’d be a great one of the bear trying to hide…and Fancy on the culvert trap…and others…but, sorry…not today!