Depending on where you are in the Rockies this year, the annual summer bear season could mean black-bear sightings in your front yard or a near-death experience while looking through the jaws of a hungry bear.

Already, the list of bear attacks across the Rockies this summer is beginning to mount.

On Saturday morning, a bear attacked a homeless man sleeping in Durango near the Animas River. The man survived, but the bear didn’t after Colorado Division of Wildlife officials turned their guns on it after the attack. A necropsy of the bear’s carcass was completed at CSU.

Last Thursday, a bear broke into a home in Bailey, southwest of Denver, biting a man.

Other bears have been sighted plundering porches and backyards in Livermore and Rist Canyon.

In the past month, bears have turned outright hostile in New Mexico, where they’ve developed an affinity for tents and a taste for the people sleeping in them.

“They’re coming down and acting kind of aggressive right now,” said Dan Williams, spokesman for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish.

New Mexico wildlife officials killed a bear at the end of June after it jumped on a tent and took a swipe at the man sleeping in it at Philmont Boy Scout Ranch, a 137,000-acre camping and backpacking ranch just south of the Colorado state line west of Raton.

There were two more incidents there: The same day, another bear was found with a goat in its mouth, and a Philmont staffer killed it. On Wednesday, a bear bit a 14-year-old Boy Scout through his tent, leaving a deep gash in his head.

“It kind of peeled back the scalp there,” Williams said.

Both campers who were attacked were carefully following strict bear-safety protocols in place at Philmont, he said.

Those incidents followed another in June when a bear swatted a man tent-camping in the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque.

But all the ursine nastiness in some parts of the West doesn’t mean there’s anything unusual going on this year, particularly in Colorado and Wyoming.

Bear activity is quite normal throughout Colorado, DOW spokesman Tyler Baskfield said.

The bears’ habitat is normal and healthy, he said, and there is no sign of increased bear sightings or attacks in any localized area, he said.

“We haven’t noticed anything that is different than we’ve seen in years when there’s decent, natural food,” said Ken Wilson, a professor of wildlife and conservation biology at Colorado State University.

“A bear has been into some trash cans in Rist Canyon,” he said. “One bear can decide it’s going to get into something, (but) it’s not all of them.”

Few bears have been seen at all in southern Wyoming, where wildlife officials consider black-bear habitat and natural food supply excellent, said Al Langston, spokesman for the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish.

In New Mexico, dry weather hurt the bears’ food supply and dried out the forbs and grass that usually get black bears through the spring.

The lack of food there is so dire that this year’s number of bear attacks hasn’t been seen in New Mexico for almost a decade, Williams said.

There are plenty of things homeowners and backcountry adventurers can do to keep bears away.

For people camping in the mountains, store food in bear-resistant containers away from your sleeping area, Wilson said.

The best way to keep plundering bears away from homes is to keep birdseed, trash and other potential food sources inside where bears can’t have easy access to them, Baskfield said.

“There’s no reason to feed birds this time of year” because natural bird food is plentiful, he said.

And, he warned city dwellers, just because you might live in Fort Collins doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep your home bear resistant.

“We get bears who wander into Fort Collins on a regular basis,” he said.

via List of bear attacks this summer grows | coloradoan.com | The Coloradoan.

(WHAS11) -  Tim Scott, the hiker that survived a black bear attack in Red River Gorge, sits down with WHAS11’s Claudia Coffey for his first television interview.

He allowed WHAS11 to come to his Springfield, Kentucky home where he explained how he escaped from the death grip of a black bear. He says the bear followed him along a trail in Red River Gorge, threw him 4 feet, then started chewing on his legs. Finally another hiker came to his aid.

He tells his account of what he thinking and how he tried to escape exclusively to WHAS11.

Scott survived but has 50 to 60 stitches on both legs. His story of survival in his own words, tonight at 5 and 6 p.m. on WHAS11 News and WHAS11.com.

The bear is still on the loose, and some 40,000 acres of campgrounds and trails are closed until the bear is caught.

via Black Bear attack victim shares his survival story

A camper woke to find a chunk of his ear had been bitten off by a black bear.

Rob Holmes, 24, slept as the bear entered his tent and ripped off a lump of flesh.

He found out about the attack when a friend woke him and his face was covered in blood. There were teeth marks on their tent.

Rob said: “I felt something on my face. I knew I’d been hurt but not how bad.”

Experts in Montana, US, confirmed mechanic Rob had been bitten by a black bear.

Medics used 21 stitches to reattach the chunk of flesh.

via Ear, a bear’s in our tent – mirror.co.uk.

MISSOULA, Mont. (AP) – Montana wildlife officials say a Washington man was injured by a black bear that bit through his tent at a primitive campsite in the Lolo National Forest in western Montana.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks wardens say Rob Holmes of Ellensburg, Wash., was awakened at about 4:30 a.m. Monday when he felt an animal bite his ear lobe. It took 21 stitches to close the wound.

Warden Capt. Jeff Darrah says it appears the bear was drawn into the area by food and other attractants that were left at a nearby camp site.

The U.S. Forest Service campground southwest of St. Regis will be closed while officials try to capture the bear. FWP Regional Supervisor Mack Long says if they can find the bear they’ll euthanize it because it has become habituated to human food.

via Daily Record-News – Ellensburg man survives bear attack in Montana.

Food and garbage abandoned at a campsite in Mineral County likely attracted a black bear that bit a Washington man on the head early Monday, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Rob Holmes, of Ellensburg, Wash., required 21 stitches on his earlobe after the bear bit him through his tent around 4:30 a.m., as he and a friend slept up Little Joe Road just southwest of St. Regis.

Holmes’ injuries were not life-threatening, and he and his friend had left for home by Monday afternoon.

After the bear bit Holmes, the man screamed. He then grabbed a flashlight and tried to follow it before driving to a Missoula hospital.

“It reacted to people, which is good,” said Mack Long, FWP regional supervisor. “But the downside is that once it is habituated, it’s almost impossible to change.”

Holmes kept a clean camp, Long said, but other campers left behind food and other attractants at the U.S. Forest Service campground, which is “primitive” and not a sanctioned campground.

“He did everything right,” said Jeff Darrah, FWP warden captain in Missoula.

The FWP is currently attempting to track down the bear, which will be euthanized once it’s found. In the meantime, the camping area is closed until further notice.

FWP officials said the radius and patterns of the bite marks on Holmes and in his tent were identical to those found on cans of food and other items at the nearby abandoned campsite.

It is unknown how long that campsite had been abandoned, but the bear likely had visited the site for at least a couple of nights, said Long. It likely was a temporary campsite for transients, he said.

Long put all blame on the campers who abandoned their site and left food and other items behind. He said “attack” is not the correct word for the incident, which will unfortunately lead to a dead bear.

Long said he believes it is the only reported case of a human injury caused by a bear in western Montana this year.

The message is clear, he stressed: Don’t leave food and other attractants open at a campsite, and never leave food behind.

via Black bear bites through tent, into sleeping man’s ear near St. Regis.

In the aftermath of a bear attack in Far North Bicentennial Park, state wildlife biologists continued Wednesday urging city officials to close the Rover's Run trail to prevent more human-bear encounters.

Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan said the city has no intention of doing that, arguing that people should use their own judgment rather than the city stepping in and declaring the trail off-limits.

“It really becomes a good common sense thing for the public to use their good common sense when an area has been identified … when there's potential danger there,” he said.

The city has closed Rover's Run the past two summers after two bear maulings in the summer of 2008 and continuing concerns over bear encounters there. Other government agencies that manage land in Alaska, including state and federal parks, regularly have closed trails or sections of parks because of bear danger.

Black bears and the occasional grizzly are seen from time to time on trails throughout Bicentennial Park, as well as other areas of the Hillside, but Rover's Run has been problematic the past three summers. Spawning salmon in the South Fork of Campbell Creek have long attracted bears, and the narrow, bumpy dirt trail, which winds alongside the creek, can make it easy for people to surprise the animals.

Rick Sinnott, the Anchorage area biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, thinks people should avoid Rover's Run, and said he's having trouble understanding the city's rationale for not posting signs making the trail off-limits.

“The city closes trails all the time,” he said.

Tuesday morning, a 45-year-old man riding his bike to work was attacked by a grizzly sow with a cub at the east end of the trail. The bicyclist suffered a torn ear and puncture wounds to his calf, but was able to ride to the Alaska Native Medical Center for treatment. Sinnott said the biker surprised the bear, and that Fish and Game has no plans to go after the animal because it wasn't acting aggressively.

Two people were mauled in separate incidents on Rover’s Run in the summer of 2008, including a 15-year-old mountain biker who was badly mauled by a grizzly near where this week’s attack occurred.

The 2008 attacks led the city to immediately close the trail. That decision carried over to last year when the trail was shut down again for the summer, Sinnott said.

This year, under Sullivan, who took office last summer, the city changed course. Sinnott said he was in talks with the city to again close Rovers’ Run starting June 10 but that didn’t happen.

Sullivan said in an interview Wednesday that he thinks a bright colored warning sign telling people of the recent encounter is adequate. He also says the city doesn’t have the ability to enforce a closure.

Sinnott said not closing the trail is confounding to him. “Ship Creek Trail is closed because of an erosion problem,” he said. Similarly, he said, a foot bridge across Campbell Creek near where this week’s attack occurred has had a sign saying it was closed until further notice, Sinnott said. It’s ironic, he said, that the city would close the bridge but now choose to leave Rover’s Run open.

“It seems like an ideological argument, ‘We’re not going to let the bears push us around,’ ” he said.

“Some people have the theory that if you cede territory to the bears, then the bears will get bolder, and they’ll take it over.

“There’s no reason to believe that,” he said. The bears are drawn to city streams because that’s where salmon are, he said. Putting people in their paths won’t necessarily make them go away, he said. Closing the trail won’t necessarily keep people off it, he noted. But it does send a strong message that there’s potential danger in the area, he said.

There is an idea to build a new trail 100 to 200 yards south of Rover’s Run so trail users can still cross the park and link up to its northwest corner, and Sinnott said he supports that.

A recent telephone survey conducted for Fish and Game found 63 percent of Anchorage residents say it is acceptable to have brown bears in Far North Bicentennial park. The survey found 89 percent said they support temporary closures of trails at times when the risk of encountering a brown bear in the area is high.

State and federal land managers in Alaska regularly close trails when there are potential dangers, spokespeople say.

Tom Harrison, superintendent of the Chugach State Park, said it’s a subjective call. “If we anticipate a high-risk situation we will probably err on the one side (of caution),” he said.

“However,” he said, “there are bears in the woods.”

This year, the park hasn’t closed any parts or trails because of bears, Harrison said. But last year, it closed an area of Bird Point because of reports of an aggressive bear. The Albert Loop near the Eagle River Nature Center has been permanently closed in the summer for years because of a history of maulings, he said.

Morgan Warthin, spokeswoman for the National Park Service in Alaska, said closing decisions are made by park superintendents. On Tuesday, a backcountry unit in Denali National Park was temporarily closed because a bear ripped a tent, she said.

Sullivan said city parks are not state or national parks.

“Do we want our urban parks to be brown bear sanctuaries or do we want them to be places where people can recreate? … I think (that) is what the purpose of these parks were when they were created, as well as the trails.”

Sullivan said the city needs to critically examine the state’s effort to reintroduce salmon into the city’s waterways. Those fish, he said, are bringing bears into the city.

Read more: http://www.adn.com/2010/06/16/1327231/bear-conflicts-create-dispute.html#ixzz0r5f9CBo9

via Bear encounters create dispute over trail status: Bears in Alaska | adn.com.

“At what point do you say, this is not good policy? This is a city first. It’s not a wildlife viewing area. It’s not a sanctuary. It is first and foremost an urban environment,” he said.

VAIL — Justin Young was hoping he'd see a bear while working in the Vail Valley this summer, but he never wanted to see one as close as he did last Friday.

Young, 25, was working for his father's construction business at a home in the 1500 block of Spring Hill Lane in East Vail when he took a break and took a stroll behind the home around 9 a.m. The next thing he knew he was about 20 feet from a black bear that he said weighed about 400 pounds.

“I spooked him,” Young said. “He immediately charged at me.”

Young, who lives in Florida full-time, said he feels incredibly fortunate to have survived the encounter. The bear hit him on the side of his head and again on the left side of his body before Young fell down. The bear knocked him out, he said, and when he regained consciousness the bear was gone. He got up and ran back to the house and told his coworkers what happened.

Young doubts his coworkers would have believed him if it wasn't for the bear hair.

“They assumed I fell down the stairs and was full of it, until they saw I was covered in bear hair,” Young said.

He walked away with some cuts and bruises, and a nasty black eye, but that was it.

His parents, Chuck and Terry Young, of Eagle, saw pictures of their son's cuts and bruises from his cell phone camera that morning. Terry Young said she got a picture message that said her son had quite the story to tell her.

“Now he has a whole new respect for bears,” Terry Young said.

Justin Young said he's pretty sure he scared the bear because it was facing away from him as he approached it. The bear reacted and went on the defensive, he said.

“I'm very fortunate the bear was on the defensive and not the offensive,” Justin Young said.

After the bear hit him once near his left eye and temple, he put up his arm to protect himself. The bear got a pretty good scratch at his left arm, and that's when Justin Young thinks he was knocked out.

He said he thinks his lifeless body as he laid there unconscious was what saved him. If he continued to fight back and try to protect himself, he said the bear may have done even more damage.

“It's probably good he knocked me out,” Justin Young said. “I'm glad I wasn't conscious for it.”

Justin Young said he has a lot of bruises and scratches on his body, too, which makes him think the bear continued to smack him around a bit while he was unconscious. He said the Division of Wildlife officer who responded to the scene told him a bear that size could exert 1,000 pounds of force.

The Vail Police Department responded to the call along with the Colorado Division of Wildlife. Justin Young said he refused an ambulance ride to the hospital because he felt fine and doesn't have health insurance.

“Now that it's done and over with, and I know that I'm not going to die from it, it's kind of a cool story,” Justin Young said.

Randy Hampton, spokesman for the Division of Wildlife, said the agency tracked the bear for more than 12 hours Friday and could see the bear a few times but couldn't catch him. They tracked him with hound dogs but lost the scent when the bear's trail led across asphalt, a surface much harder for dogs to smell.

“Any situation in Colorado where we deal with an aggressive animal injuring a person, the policy is typically that the animal is going to be put down,” Hampton said.

Hampton said that while it's not exactly common to hear of a bear attacking or charging at a person, it does happen several times a year in Colorado. There were three incidents last year in the Aspen-area alone where people were physically injured by bears, he said.

“That being said, it's more common to get attacked by your neighbor's dog than a bear,” Hampton said.

Hampton said he didn't have information on the size or sex of the bear that attacked Justin Young. He said 400 pounds sounds pretty large, though, for a black bear this time of year.

“What we find is that most often, because of their hair and how much hair they have it makes them appear much larger,” Hampton said. “Guessing the weight of a bear is extremely difficult.”

via Bear attacks man in East Vail | VailDaily.com.

NELSON – A recent bear attack on a four-year-old girl and her grandmother in their yard has prompted a call for diligence.

Conservation officer Len Butler killed the mature male black bear after it clawed Nine Mile resident Jane Tillotson and visiting granddaughter Megan Chapple.

The young girl required six to eight stitches on her leg following the Aug. 24 attack.

“I was babysitting my granddaughters, who are four and six, and we went out to work in my vegetable garden,” Tillotson said.

“We'd been there for maybe 15 or 20 minutes making lots of noise. My littlest granddaughter just yelled for me and I turned and looked at her and a big bear was right behind her.

“The bear swiped at her and cut the back of her calf so she fell. It looked like that bear was going to bite her.”

Tillotson said she scooped up Megan and slowly backed away from the bear with her other granddaughter right behind her.

The bear swiped at the child again, scratching Megan's belly and — though she didn't feel it at the time — Tillotson's thigh.

“I was just shrieking hysterically at the top of my lungs,” said Tillotson. “It was probably no more than a few seconds but it seemed like forever to me [before] it stopped and ambled out of the garden.”

Butler said he doesn't think the attack was predatory in nature.

“Basically the bear was there to get something to eat and these people were in the way,” he said. ” If the bear wanted to kill the little girl, [it] could have.”

When he arrived at the home, Butler said he found a “fairly large” black bear in the neighbour's compost. He had his dog chase the bear into a tree where it was shot.

Garth Mowat, the B.C. Environment Ministry's senior wildlife biologist for the Kootenay region, said it's rare for a black bear to attack and knew of only one other human-related attack by a bear in the past 18 months. “I've not heard of black bears attacking people over food very often,” he said. “There might have been something else going on.”

Mowat suggested the bear may have been afraid or it took the child for a dog that was bothering it.

A few days after the attack, Nelson police shot a black bear hunkered down in a residential area along a road frequented by school children.

Part of the problem, say wildlife experts, is people leaving garbage and compost accessible to bears.

Butler said conservation officers will be issuing more wildlife protection orders to clear garbage, compost and fallen fruit. People who don't comply could be fined $345.

via Public warned after bear attacks girl, woman.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The 2010 bear season is here, and so far the bears are paying the price for encounters with humans in the Anchorage area.

On Friday, an Eagle River homeowner killed a young black bear that sneaked into a chicken coop and killed a bird. This occurred hours after a different bear “mouthed” the leg of a girl at a neighborhood playground near Elmendorf Air Force Base.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game says so far six young bears have been shot in the municipality of Anchorage – most of them in Eagle River – over roughly the past two weeks.

The attack on the chicken occurred at about 10 p.m. Friday, as George Drummond sat dozing in front of the television at his home. A neighbor banged on his door and told him there was a bear in his coop.

Drummond, 62, looked outside to see a 150-pound black bear eating his favorite chicken, an Araucana named Goldie.

Drummond said he picked up a garden hose, set it on “jet” and sprayed.

“I was squirting it in the head and the face, and it just looked at me,” he said.

He then fired his tiny .25-caliber handgun four times into the ground to scare the animal away. The bear moved toward his neighbor, Drummond said.

“It kind of made an advance towards him. So he gave it a couple shots with the .45,” he said.

Dying, the bear crossed the road where Drummond said he killed it with two more gun shots from the .25.

A ranger also shot a black bear at the Eagle River Nature Center on Friday, said Department of Fish and Game area biologist Greg Sinnott. “It was trying to get in all the doors and couldn't be driven away.”

A black bear also reportedly walked up to four girls at a playground in the Moose Crossing military housing between Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson, said Elmendorf Deputy Public Affairs Officer Stephen Lee.

“Three of them, I'm told, hit the ground, to kind of just play dead,” Lee said.

The fourth girl stood and talked to the bear, “Trying to make herself as big as possible to scare the bear away,” he said.

The bear, which looked to be about 3 years old, approached one of the girls who was laying down and “mouthed” her leg, Lee said.

The girl screamed and the bear split, running for the woods.

The girl had a mark on her leg but no puncture wounds.

Military wildlife agents searched for the animal but couldn't find it, Lee said.

Playing dead is normally considered a last resort and isn’t a good idea with all bears, said Valerie Connor, conservation director for the Alaska Center for the Environment.

The theory is if attacked by a black bear, fight back, but curl into a ball and protect your neck from brown bears.

via Fairbanks Daily News-Miner – Alaska bears paying price for human encounters.

Link

Sounds just terrible. Surprising to see a black bear involved in such a ferocious attack.

Gerald Marois heard the bear before he saw it.

“I turned around and he was about 50 feet away — one of the biggest bears I had ever seen in my life.

“He looked at me and moved sideways a bit, I start backing up and he just charged me. He came full blast, man.”

Marois, 47, a retired steelworker and experienced hunter from Waubaushene, was mauled by a large black bear last Tuesday evening in a remote wooded area about 30 km northwest of Orillia.

He was airlifted to Sunnybrook hospital, where he gave the Star an exclusive and terrifying account of his near-death encounter.

Marois was planting a food plot in a small clearing about 150 feet inside the bush line, where he planned to hunt deer in the fall — “My Dad taught me that’s where you get the big buck” — when the bear came up from behind him.

“His head was huge, his eyes were really far apart from each other and he had tiny, tiny ears, which is the sign of a huge boar — probably 600 pounds.”

When the bear charged, Marois said he turned around and ran toward a nearby oak tree — “The one I wanted to put my tree-stand in” — and climbed three-quarters of the way up.

The bear followed him up.

Marois shakes as he tells the story from his hospital bed, his arms, legs and face covered in deep gashes.

Marois said he tried to fight the bear off from the trees upper branches, but it kept coming up after him.

“I was hitting him on the nose and on the head, trying to hurt him, and every time I hit him he was scraping me and just pulling on my boots.”

The bear pulled one of his boots off and started biting the bottom of his feet.

“Then he dragged me almost to the ground.”

Marois tried and tried to get away from the bear by climbing farther up the tree, but the bear repeatedly dragged him down.

“I was kicking him with the other boot and he grabbed that boot and he ripped it right off.”

The bear then tried to rip off Marois’s chest waders.

“That was messing him up, because they were coming back like an elastic, eh? And it was hard for him to rip them off.”

But the bear eventually got them.

“Then he started eating my flesh.”

Marois said he watched as the bear started eating into his right calf.

“He was eating my meat and he was licking the blood and licking himself and just enjoying every bite of it.

Marois suffered his worst injuries to his legs, which required a skin graft to repair. They look torn apart and scrawny when he lifts up his hospital gown.

“He ate my whole calf.”

Marois says he made at least 10 attempts to climb away from the bear and it kept coming after him.

“I was trying to get away from him in every direction that I could in that oak tree, but he kept on dragging me down; he wanted me down on the ground.”

Marois, who said he forgot his bear spray at home, then turned to the only weapon he had.

“I got my lighter out” — a regular cigarette lighter — “and I started burning his face.”

Marois said when he shoved the lighter in the bear’s face it clawed him in the head.

“And that was it with the lighter, eh? No more lighters.”

Proof of the bear’s swipe comes in the two long rows of stitches on the top and side of Marois’s head.

“I got really weak from that hit. I had barely nothing left, so I told God I was putting my life in his hands.”

He said he prayed to God to send his guardian angel to protect him, because he couldn’t fight the bear off any longer.

At that moment, the bear threw Marois from the tree — Marois figures about 20 feet — and he landed with a thud and a loud groan.

When he looked up he watched the bear dive out of the tree in the opposite direction.

“It seemed like God scare him, man. People don’t believe in God, but I’m telling you, man, something scare him. Because he got scared, he jumped in the rough and he took off.”

Marois said the attack definitely lasted more than 15 minutes, though he says it “felt like forever.”

But he knew he still wasn’t safe.

He heard the bear roaming around him, gnashing his teeth and making a guttural barking noise Marois called a “bawl” — the same noise it made before charging at him.

“I was sure I was dead. I told God, ‘Keep your hand over me, protect me.’”

Marois called his wife and then 911, but the rescue team and emergency crews couldn’t find him in the thick bush.

It took rescuers — with the help of Marois’ wife, Louise Beauchamp — more than an hour to find him. All the while Marois could hear the bear nearby.

Eventually the rescuers found him, and with Marois’s legs ripped to shreds, they moved him to a clearing where the air ambulance helicopter could land.

“That’s when I finally could breathe.”

The next thing Marois remembers is waking up in the hospital.

Marois’ health has been improving every day, but doctors tell him he may need plastic surgery to fix his legs. He says he has nightmares about the attack every time he sleeps.“It’s extremely hard for me to rest.”

Though he sometimes struggles to tell the story, Marois speaks angrily about the cancellation of the spring bear hunt in Ontario more than 10 years ago.

“I want (Premier Dalton McGuinty) to reconsider the spring bear hunt, so this doesn’t happen no more.”

Mike Harris’s provincial government ended the spring bear hunt in 1999 after it had been in place for 30 years. Critics called the spring hunt “barbaric” because it often left behind thousands of orphaned cubs. All other Canadian provinces with bears have spring hunts except Nova Scotia. Ontario still has a fall bear hunt, which starts in September.

A spokesman for Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources said Friday that they thought the bear may have mistaken Marois — bent over and wearing chest waders — as a deer.

But Marois believes the bear was tracking him.

“He didn’t mistake me for nothing. That bear wanted to maul me; he was hungry and he came to get me.”

The ministry says bear encounters are not on the rise in the province, but Marois says he and his neighbours have seen different.

“We live up north, the bear are coming in our town, in our kids’ schoolyard. They walk the streets with their babies.

“I want the population of Toronto to be aware that they’re not scared of us. They roam the forest and if they’re hungry, they’ll get you, man. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Marois said his rescuers — a combination of OPP officers, paramedics and Port Severn firefighters — risked their lives entering the bush the way they did, not knowing if the bear was still in the area.

“I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart.”

Marois, who has been living in the Waubaushene area for more than 20 years, comes from a hunting family in rural Quebec.

“I was born with a rabbit snare and a pellet gun in my hands.”

But now he says he may never hunt again.

“It will be really hard to go back in the bush after this.”