Black bear in beech mast woods
— — the autumn the woods feed the bears.
Not only on a wall.
“A black bear under a stand of American beech in the Green Mountains, working the ground for the year's mast. Beechnuts come heavy every two or three years in Vermont, and when they do the bears climb. The claw marks on smooth grey beech bark are bear sign older than any of the trails, scars layered over decades. Vermont holds the densest black bear population in the eastern United States, around 5,000 animals. In late September they eat almost nothing else, eighteen hours a day, banking the fat that has to last the winter.
Black bear in beech mast woods, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Vermont's black bear range is the whole forested state, with the densest population in the Green Mountain National Forest spine running north to south. Vermont Fish and Wildlife estimates around 5,000 bears, one of the highest densities in the eastern United States. The bears favour mixed northern hardwood forest where American beech, Fagus grandifolia, mixes with maple, birch, and oak. Beech ridges above 1,500 feet are core fall feeding ground, especially in the Worcester Range, the Lye Brook Wilderness, and the slopes of Camel's Hump.
Hyperphagia is the autumn frenzy. From early September into November, a bear eats up to 20,000 calories a day and spends eighteen hours feeding, banking the fat that has to carry it through five months of denning. Beechnuts are the prize crop, high-fat and abundant in mast years. The trees do not bear evenly. Vermont biologists track a two-to-three-year cycle, and in a heavy year a single beech ridge can hold dozens of bears at once, climbing up to fifty feet to break in branches for the nuts.
You almost never see a bear. You see the sign. Smooth grey beech trunks carry claw scars layered over decades, the most reliable bear evidence in the New England woods. Bear nests, the broken branches a feeding bear pulls in around itself in the canopy, look like crow's nests from below. Scat full of beechnut hulls and apple skin marks the trail through late October. The Long Trail and the dirt logging roads through the Green Mountain National Forest cross this ground for most of their 272 miles.