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A black bear (Ursus americanus), photographed in Grand Teton National Park. It was the first of two my wife and I saw walking along the Leigh Lake trail that afternoon.
An old dead tree in Leigh Lake at Grand Teton National Park.
I'm referring to moose, of course. From an interview with biologist Joel Berger in the New York Times:
Q. O.K., why did the moose go down to the road?
A. If she's a native of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and she's pregnant, she may have done it because she wanted to give birth in a place…
The American Black Bear (Ursus americanus) is so common in northern New Jersey that many people don't need to go to a zoo in order to see one. Although there have been occasional sightings of the animals in New Brunswick, I've only once seen a Black Bear in the wild, a large individual that…
Seems to me that people who live near Yellowstone aren't as lucky seeing bears so close.
It is funny that you should mention that. We only saw one bear while in Yellowstone, a grizzly, and that was at a distance (it was walking near the treeline in Hayden Valley near Grizzly Lookout). In the Tetons, by contrast, we saw three black bears which all were within at least 20 feet of the trails (and then two of them actually started walking along the trails).
This probably has to do with our timing and the habitat. The openings in the trees created by the paths allow more sunlight down and seem to foster a lot of berry-producing bushes. (There were lots of huckleberries along these trails.) There were also a lot of ants both in the ground and in rotting logs, so it seems that by cutting trails through the woods in the Tetons the parks have made prime black bear habitat.