Sometime in the late hours last night, a black bear was spotted in our downtown area. I first learned anything about the story when I first got on the computer today and checked KnoxViews.
I checked out the main local news sources, but whoever is writing for them just makes me cringe. It was all so . . . local news show. This site does have some video of the bear if you are so inclined.
It's expected that more animals may be seen in the area as summer approaches and into fall, partly due to our freeze in spring having destroyed much of the berries and acorns that make up the vast portion of the bear's typical diet.
After reading one local news site's description of what to do when confronted with a bear I knew I had to find something better. It didn't not seem to make sense, but I wondered how accurate this was, and I wondered if they were about to get someone killed.
This led me to the National Park Service page for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They have a great page about bears as well as bear safety tips. If you live near here or pretty much anywhere apparently, it wouldn't hurt to know what to do if you see a bear.
I'm not going into the steps here. Click over and read about it yourself. I'm not a park ranger or any sort of authority on bears, so I feel it would be wildly inappropriate for me to attempt it, and I wouldn't trust anyone that listened to me anyway. The GRSM page does a great job of it, such a good job in fact that this site pretty much lifted it whole with some really shitty editing to pretend they wrote it themselves. My googling brought up the second site first, at which I read about black bears. The writing is obviously poor, and as I read, I just couldn't trust a site that didn't have someone editing even a little bit. Imagine my surprise reading the original moments later after refining my google search.
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