Awwwww

The highlight of this morning's Audubon walk was when our intrepid little group came across a black bear sow up in a tree 50 feet or so off the trail.  We were all madly clicking away as Mama watched us ... when suddenly someone said "I think I see a cub!"  Twelve lenses of varying lengths now pointed directly at Mama in the tree... and out popped this little head!  Even the veteran naturalists could be heard softly oohing and awwing.  Not often you get to see something like this.  

There was a large hollowed out spot on the back of the tree and we all speculated that she may have denned there this winter where she would have given birth to her cub/s.  Not sure if she had any more youngsters stashed in the tree as we only saw this one.  A single-cub brood would be unusual, but who knows?  Anyway, we continued on our walk and when we passed the same tree again about 30 minutes later, she was still up in it, although the baby was out of sight.

Definitely a blippable moment, and one for the memory books for me.

It was great fun seeing everyone this morning - they all gave me some ribbing about missing the bad winter here while I tried not to rub it in too much that while they were all freezing, I was walking barefoot on the sand...  Meanwhile, today we logged 25 different species of birds - not bad considering that almost none of the songbirds have arrived yet!

The weather here is still quite chilly and windy, so I was bundled up for the duration of the walk.  Hard to think I was wearing shorts and t-shirts a mere two weeks ago...

I posted five other pics of the bears plus a stray fall leaf starting HERE on Flickr