Bears in my trees!

Daisy woke us up around 5 this morning barking like crazy.  We looked out the bedroom window and even though it was still dark, we could see big black shapes moving around and climbing the trees by the creek (about 10 yards from our back deck).  They were so close we could hear them talking to each other... they made low whiny noises, kinda like Chewbacca.  They also went "ooh, ooh, ooh" sorta like monkeys when they climbed up or down the tree.

After shutting up the dog and watching their silhouettes a while, we finally got brave enough to go out onto the deck (with the flood lights on and the pistol in my pocket).  Wish we could've taken a picture of them at the time, but the camera was in the truck, and they were closer to it than we were!  I've attached a picture that i took this morning after it got daylight.  There were two cubs in the tree just left of the stump, and the mama was walking around on the ground behind the creek.  What we didn't know was there was a third cub in the pine tree (the big tree in the left of the picture), and when we heard it move we both about jumped out of our skin!  We didn't get a good look at the mom, but we could see the cubs really well with the flood lights.  They weren't in a huge hurry, but after a couple minutes with the lights on the mama bear went back into the woods and the cubs climbed down and followed her.  We probably watched them for 10-15 minutes total.  Who knows how long they would've stuck around if we had stayed inside.

We've been hearing about "A" bear in the woods behind campus... last week a professor who lives about a mile back behind campus told me about getting up close and personal with one right next to his house a couple weeks ago, and Monday morning another professor who knows our neighbors warned me that there had been "A" bear frequenting our neighbors' yard, so we sould avoid leaving out anything that might attract them (trash, dog food, bird feeders).  So we've been on the lookout for "A" bear, but we were very surprised to see FOUR bears!