‘Flock of bears’ investigates water bowl outside Florida home. See them snoop
Just south of Pensacola in the Florida panhandle, Laura Palmer-Cobb lives with her family in a place she calls “Zootopia.”
Her Gulf Breeze home, just west of the Naval Live Oaks Nature Preserve, is constantly visited by four-legged creatures and night critters, she said, prompting her to put out a Ring Doorbell camera to catch a glimpse of the action.
“We have been in our home for almost 4 years; after living here for a few months and (seeing) our first bear, we knew we had to get a Ring Camera,” Palmer-Cobb told McClatchy News. “So, we have it all over the house, (mainly) for catching the wildlife!”
Since then, Palmer-Cobb has been sharing videos of the animals that visit “Zootopia” on her Facebook page, from possums and raccoons to foxes and bears.
On March 12, her camera caught something a little extra special — a “flock of bears,” she said.
In the video, a large female black bear walks into the frame and sniffs the chair sitting on the edge of a concrete slab.
She’s soon joined by a smaller bear, which may be her cub, as she walks over to a water bowl intended for a stray cat that visits the home.
Their movements trigger a motion light on the outside shed, and the smaller bear walks right up to the camera, giving it a sniff.
“We have bears come through several times and it is always difficult to know if it’s the same ones or not,” Palmer-Cobb said. “We do seem to watch the babies grow up!”
Back in February, the camera on the front of their house captured two black bears as they crossed from the back yard into the neighborhood and across the street.
The bears were particularly interested in the chair and water bowl outside the home, the video shows, and Palmer-Cobb said her family put those out for the stray cat, who they’ve named Blue.
“(We put) a chair so I can sit with her at night and hand feed her,” Palmer-Cobb said. “The raccoons are scared of no one so when I feed her, sometimes they try and come up and eat what I’m giving her! Always on guard when the sun goes down. I’ve put out toys for Blue and the raccoons and opossums will play with them!”
She’s shared some of these interactions on Facebook.
In one video from March 9, Blue sits quietly on her chair while a possum snoops around underneath her, at one point looking up at the chair and sniffing. The two don’t interact, and eventually the possum walks away for a drink of water.
The Georgia native said she didn’t know they would encounter so much wildlife when they moved south, but now it’s one of her favorite things about their home.
“I just want to say that I absolutely love it; it’s scary and beautiful at the same time,” Palmer-Cobb said. “There is nowhere else that I would rather live!”
Gulf Breeze is about a 200-mile drive west from Tallahassee.
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