Great pics!
On Vancouver Island at this time of year, three of us heard and watched a black bear making a kind of whiny singing sound. It reminded me of whale song though it was not quite as high pitched. None of us had ever heard a bear make such a sound, and I never have since. We assumed it was some kind of mating sound.
Anybody else heard this?
Another possible bear mating sound: A month ago, some kind of large animal made a loud belch/bellow sound at me when I broke a dry limb as I hiked to a lion calling stand. It was several hundred yards away in forest. Two minutes and 150 yards later I scraped through the limbs of a fallen alder, and instantly the thing bellowed/belched at me again, this time from within 100 yards on the old abandoned road. I set up and called, heard something nosing about within the first five minutes, then nothing for the rest of the hour. I guessed that this was a bear in mating mood, doing an interrogatory bawl to ask what critter was making clumsy sounds in the brush.
If in Canada in Fall, I'd assume this loud bawl/belch was a bull moose interrogatory, but not on the Olympic Penninsula. Bear? Cougar? (I've never seen an elk nor elk track in that watershed or might consider elk as the bellower.)
