bear butt bingo, or: how John Hughes invaded my parents' vacation

Now that everyone in my family has seen the bears at Allegany, I suppose I have to accept the fact that there are bears in the park.

My brother comes back from visiting my aunt and uncle's cabin. He reports to our parents that he's now seen every animal in the park. Apparently, while he was driving over to their place, in the middle of the afternoon, a bear and a deer ran across the road. Of course, my mom, who's telling me this story, doesn't remember what order they were in. I prefer to think of the deer chasing the bear around. But anyway...

So he gets over to their cabin and explains what he saw. My aunt says, "Oh, yeah. We've been watching one all afternoon." There's been a bear visiting the dumpster up the road from their cabin and helping himself. He comes down the hill, walks over to the dumpster (a big green metal one with a relatively heavy lid), lifts the lid up, pulls out a bag of garbage, and drags it back up the hill. He repeats this relatively frequently and to the amusement of the campers who are still left. (It's now the week after Memorial Day, so the campground has mostly cleared out.)

Now my parents are jealous. They haven't seen one yet. So they go out driving around the park at dusk on bear patrol. On their two hour excursion, they find evidence of the garbage-snatchers -- from trash strewn all over to a completely overturned dumpster in the tent camping area -- but they don't see any specimens.

The following day, they're driving around (again in the middle of the afternoon), and a bear runs across the road in front of the car. Finally they've seen one.

I ask my mom how big it was. She says "bear-sized." I guess it was a full-grown black bear, which can get pretty big. I wouldn't want to run into one walking along in the middle of the night, but given their preference for running about in the middle of the afternoon, this probably wouldn't be an issue.

The Park employees tell my mom that they've caught three bears already this spring. Instead of destroying them or releasing them somewhere else (this is sort of wilderness already), they paint their butts.

Yup, paint their butts. Bright colors. So they can tell which bear is which.

Shades of "The Great Outdoors," anyone?

My parents and brother saw unpainted bear butts. How disappointing! I'm so going to set up a game of bear butt bingo the next time I'm there.

Pink Butt.

Chartreuse Butt.

Orange Butt.

BINGO!