I saw this deer across the street as I was leaving home.

He seemed to have found some yummy leaves and was intent on chowing down. Normally I cross the road to where the deer is standing, but I didn’t want to bother him.

With the drought and fires this season, the animals have had a tough time of it and more and more are entering urban areas to find food. This includes an uptick in the number of bears coming into people’s yards, as shown in the recent photos below from Quesnel, British Columbia; the entire article is here.

This is a grizzly bear. Black bears are more commonly found in urban areas but grizzlies are different. They dislike and avoid humans, so this tells me that they are being driven by hunger.

This underweight grizzly is pulling crabapples from a tree in a residential yard. Given the difficult summer they’ve had, we will likely begin to see more of them trying to fatten up for hibernation and will need to be cautious.

Happy Wednesday.