Proverbs 17:12: “Let a man meet a she-bear robbed of her cubs, rather than a fool in his folly.”

I spend much of the summer in a place of 300 homes, often pretentiously called “cottages,” with a golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool and other sports facilities. The community is surrounded by thousands of acres of woodlands, and as a result residents often see wildlife. Seeing a deer as a kid in rural Wisconsin was a thrill because it was still a rare sight. Nowadays, of course, Bambis and their mothers are common in many communities, including mine.

Twenty years ago, deer were still skittish. A human sound, a voice, a door closing, a car on gravel, usually had the deer bolting into wood cover. Now the deer just raise their heads with brazen looks and seemingly say, “You don’t want me to eat your plants? What are you going to do about it?” I see deer frequently and seldom pay much attention to them, except when I think they might run across the road that I am driving or when fawns are playing near the porch where I am reading or when they run after being startled. A deer in flight leaping over a fallen log is still a beautiful sight. The deer I see, however, are almost always does and fawns. The infrequent sighting of an antlered buck still gets my attention.

I see woodchucks often, usually on the golf course. They bring a smile with their distinctive chubby bodies and waddle. They move slowly but then quickly disappear into a hole.

Wild turkeys also draw attention. Often there are just two or three of them, but on occasion, a flock of a dozen or more are going someplace, but I have no idea where. They never seem in a hurry. Can they fly?

Foxes seem to have increased. I believe I saw only one in my first decade in the community, but now, while sightings are not an everyday occurrence, they are more common.

I don’t pay much attention to birds, except for hawks and eagles, who I will watch soar for as long as possible. Always magnificent.

There is a hierarchy of noteworthiness among this wildlife. Almost never does one mention a deer to a companion except as a warning. And the same is almost always true for woodchucks. Wild turkeys occasionally get a comment. Foxes generally do, but they often disappear before they are spotted by a friend. Hawks and eagles circling in the sky generally draw remarks that often spread beyond the immediate circle. If a person sees a bald eagle while sitting on a restaurant patio, he will often tell not only his tablemates but also those seated at other tables. A hooting barrred owl also gets some attention. But none of these animals triggers a neighborhood network. Only a bear does that.

That is what happened the other night at dinnertime. My cell phone rang. A few moments later the spouse’s rang. And a few moments later, the still-existing landline rang. Picking up, our neighbors told us that a bear was up a tree across the street. Of course, we went to look. There, joined by other neighbors, we see her (we assumed) indistinctly silhouetted against the night sky about twenty-five feet above the ground. She barely moved for minutes but then stretched upwards on the tree trunk looking more than six feet tall. I saw that my garbage can, placed by the road for the next day’s pickup, was on its side. It had not been ripped apart but opened with the kitchen garbage bag gone. We looked, we chatted, we laughed, we told stories, and the bear stayed in the tree. We finally decided that we should all leave so that the bear might come down and go about its business.

A bear sighting is the most exciting one among us cottagers, and when it happens, stories circulate in the community. For me, all my infrequent bear sightings—the one in the distant field, the one on the back porch, the one peering in the front window, the one with two cubs–are memorable, and I can give you details of every time I have seen one. There are many animals around here, but the bear is king.