Hardly Bearable

Bear Update: It's been about 24 hours since the great bear sighting of 2006 and I've now had time to let all the facts sit with me for a while. Looking at the pictures today with my colleages we decided that the 'bear' silhouette was rather unbearish. As a sanity check, we did a check of bear habitats in Georgia and we learned that bears are not common on the coast at all. This pretty much confirms that my sighting couldn't have been black bears.

We have a new theory my sighting was actually wild boar. Wild boar are very common in the coastal area, have a black silhouette like the bear and the sows can grow to nearly bear size. Looking at the pictures, the baby following the momma has a pretty distinct floppy ear. This leads me to think these were boars, not bears. I'll let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.

Wild boars aren't quite as cool as sighting ferocious, man-eating bears but it was a neat find, nonetheless.