Have you ever had a bear incident?

[u/dke783]

Honest question: have you ever had to fend off an aggressive bear in Canada? (hunting or otherwise) What happened,​ and what worked for your response? ​​

[u/tmsa_prez]

Our range is sandwiched between regional park, provincial park, research forest and berry fields. You can see black bears almost daily there. There’s plenty of resources for them. The one big boar; he dgaf. He’s walked beside the running truck while I was 20m away running a saw. Thankfully our full time range guy who was in the truck has enough sense to just let him walk past and not try to spook him towards me. The sows; we were watching one with a yearling last week. At 50m, she didn’t care about us, just kept munching grass. Little guy kept an eye on us. Tuesday I was maybe 30m from a sow with 2 cubs and she just grunted and they took off down the hill. They were pretty cute. They backed off a bit and the cubs climbed a tree. Little down the road there’s some hay fields that you can often see one in. Almost smoked one there with the car. He came running out of the bush, ripped a 180 and back into the bush.

Incidents: not really. Garbage gets collected every day and is in a big container with a heavy lid opened with a winch. They’ve chewed into lots of gas cans over the years; we don’t use them anymore. Odd pylon or delineator gets chewed, or slapped around a bit. Muddy paw prints on the windows, lots of poops on the road.

I’m often up there by myself just looking at what needs done or how a project is progressing. I usually have spray with me just in case. And I walk slow and make noise so I don’t surprise any critters.