Look Who's Having Fun at the Bear Wallow

There’s a vernal (seasonal) pool in the forest that was created thousands of years ago, probably as a pingo scar (see this post). It fills with water every winter and spring and gradually dries during the summer. The pool is a breeding site for wood frogs and a variety of salamanders, a hunting ground where raccoons and great blue herons search for frogs, and a place for black bears to cool off on warm days (watch the bears in this post).

One of my camera traps has been at the bear wallow since late spring and has been repeatedly examined by the bears using the pool; twice this year the bears have rotated the camera to the far side of the tree to which it’s mounted, and it's sill somewhat misaligned Recently there haven't been any bears in the videos taken by the camera but other wildlife species make regular appearances.

As summer arrived the pool was shrinking, but it still held a fair bit of water at dawn of what promised to be a hot summer day. The sun was low in the sky when a white-tail doe and her two fawns from the previous year arrived at the pool.

Although some people say animals don’t have emotions and don’t engage in what could be described as play, you can judge for yourself what’s going on in this video (best if your speaker is turned on) –

At 2:45 of the video another doe and her last-year’s fawn arrived; with their arrival all semblance of play came to a halt. If the deer that were running and jumping in the pool were human, we would say they were embarrassed being caught playing like kids. There follows a dominance/aggressive interaction between the two adult does; the fawns’ relations are more peaceful. When the buck arrived the does and fawns slowly departed.

That’s all folks because at that point the camera’s memory card was full.