There's a black bear in the neighborhood.

This is not the bear.

I borrowed this picture from naturalflorida.blogspot.com another site. This is a good example of what our bear would look like.

This morning our dog went crazy barking and biting at the sliding glass door in the back yard. It took me a while to get over and look out and what ever it was, was gone. I thought maybe it was someone trying to break in our house. I've never seen him freak out that way. Then when I got to work, a friend who lives a couple of blocks away said he saw a black bear that morning and it looked like it was headed toward us. His dogs had been spooked really badly the day before but they assumed it was from all the lightning we've been having lately. The dogs were found a couple of houses away. There is a reserve not to far from us between our house and theirs and also a large lake near by but I didn't think it would be enough to support a bear. We had heard there were coyotes around this area, so we've been keeping an eye on the dog when he goes out at night. We will have to keep an extra eye out now.

Luckily Florida black bears are not known to be aggressive. They are laid back and easy going like everyone in Florida. A few years ago on a camping trip we encountered a bear. It wondered right into our camp. We were sitting around the fire in the dark. We did all the wrong things. Chris took off running. The kids were sleeping in the tent and I jumped up and stood in front of the tent trying to look big ready to fight a bear in the dark. Finally Chris regained his senses and came back with a light and a guy with a gun. The bear had stood there the whole time looking at me like I was crazy. Turned out the bear had two little cubs following her. We all shouted and shooed them back into the woods where they had come from. But if that had been another type of bear no doubt we'd have all been goners, as I have heard horror story's about grizzly bear attacks my whole life.