Unbear-able

I am relatively happy to report that while the ten o’clock rabbit still makes its occasional appearance, there is no eleven o’clock bear. This report is for the benefit of those who may have read the news in the local papers about bear sightings in and around Connecticut. I too have read the reports and so decided to conduct a little investigation of my own.

The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection maintains a webpage on Black Bear Sightings in the state, including a table of statistics, broken down by town. As a newcomer to the state I had of course no idea where Wafflebury or East Noodleham was, and so was hoping that they also had a map. No dice. The table was also unhelpful in being sorted by name rather than number of bears spotted, so I fired up my spreadsheet program, google maps, and an image editor and produced the much more visually informative map seen here. I sorted out the table by decreasing numbers of bears, and then plotted them out on the map, with bigger circles for the larger number of bear sightings.

There are a number of take-aways from this map. The first is, that life in and around Simsbury must be very exciting (235 bear sightings last year). The second thing to notice is, none of the sightings substantial enough to plot on the map occur east of the Connecticut River. Now bears can of course swim, but they seem to have a preference for rivers shallow enough for them to be able to stand around and swat out salmon with their paws, and are otherwise land dwelling creatures. This means that all those bears who are currently raiding the bird feeders in Simsbury have only two or three options if they decide that they’d like to check out the honey farms here in South Glastonbury.

1. One option is to get on Interstate 91 south through Hartford then cut across to the 84 East that crosses the river at the Bulkeley Bridge
2. The other option is amble their way down to Rocky Hill and take the little ferry boat.

Now black bears, though blessed with excellent navigation skills, are notoriously bad drivers, and very few have the three dollar fare to pay for the ferry ride at Rocky Hill. So, what I get from all this is that until the economy improves, we are relatively safe here in South Glastonbury from the North American Black bear.

If the rabbit decides to go carnivore on us, however, we are in deep trouble.