Look Out For Bears!

We woke up yesterday morning and found that some critter had knocked our birdbath completely over, denting the edge of the basin and knocking the water wiggler across the path.  Since it's a fairly substantial birdbath, it had to be a fairly substantial critter that did it.

That started us wondering what animal could have done this.  I don't think that even the big papa skunk we've seen around is big enough to do it.  A large raccoon could probably tip it over, or possibly the neighbors' cat could have jumped up on it, but there seemed like a lot of destruction for that.

Then we found a strange track in the decomposed granite pathway.

The track was about four inches wide by about four inches long and appeared to have at least four separate toes and possible a fifth toe, too.  We couldn't see any claw marks in the DG, but it's probably too coarse a texture for that, anyway.  

That started me off on an internet search of tracks of various animals that could have done it:  dog, coyote, cougar and bear.  The bear tracks at the San Diego Natural History Museum look the closest to what we saw, considering the size of the track and the number and width of the toes.

It's really hard to believe it could be a bear, considering that we live in a city of 1.3 million people, surrounded by freeways, but that was our reaction to the suggestion that deer had chomped our citrus trees, until a deer crashed through the IHOP window a few miles away.  

However, my brother, who is familiar with the tracks of many different types of critters, says he thinks it was most likely a large dog; a bear would probably have also trashed our bird feeder, especially the suet feeder, and there would probably have been a lot more digging in the raised beds. 

O.K., so maybe it's a dog, but we're going to be pretty cautious about going outside at night from now on.