I just spent a wonderful week in the western Adirondacks, and I was able to indulge in one of my favorite activities: exploring the Independence River on foot–in other words, wading. Besides being breathtakingly beautiful, the Independence is small enough to be safely waded when water levels are low, and there are plenty of sandbars and silty edges where tracks can be found. These bear tracks were the find of the day. 
The bear was traveling from left to right, and my dog (she likes to explore rivers with me) left tracks below the bear’s, going in the opposite direction. The first bear print at the upper left is the right front, and just to its right is the right rear. A little farther to the right is the left front print and to its left the left rear. The pattern of rear print ahead of front from the same side tells me that the bear was moving at an overstep walk–a gait often used for relaxed investigation or leisurely travel.
I was excited to find bear tracks because they’re not always easy to find, especially in late summer when the animals are spending much of their time in forests, overgrown clearings, or other relatively untrackable places. The bear may have visited the river to drink, or perhaps to use the shoreline as an easy travel route to a new food source. But even if there are no tracks to be found, 
there are usually plenty of other indicators that bears are in the neighborhood. Bears use a variety of marking techniques to communicate with other bears, and these marks are often prominent and long-lasting. A bear raked this white pine tree with its claws, leaving fresh claw marks which oozed with copious sap flows.
Man-made structures like signs and lean-tos are often targets of bear marking. 
On a different day during my recent visit to the ‘Daks I walked along a forest road where posts had been set to mark the locations of culverts. It was clear that bears were habitually using that road–many of the posts, like this one, were ravaged by bear bites. The brighter wood exposed by the bites stands out to our eyes, but for the bear the scent of the saliva-soaked wood is probably more important.
Teeth and claws aren’t the only things bears use to make their presence known. 
They often rub against trees or wooden structures leaving a personal scent signature from the oils and sebaceous chemicals in their fur. Another post along that same forest road was decorated with hairs left by a bear that had done just that.
And then there’s always scat. Piles of bear scat provide long-lasting samples of what bears are eating. 
This time of year in the Adirondacks black cherries are a favorite item, as demonstrated by this example. Elsewhere the skins and seeds of apples, grapes, viburnums and berries; squash and pumpkin seeds; corn kernels; or the shells of hickory nuts, beechnuts and acorns may show up in late summer scat. This is the season of ursine hyperphagia, the insatiable hunger that drives bears to eat almost 24 hours a day. The thick layers of fat they put on will allow them to survive their long winter hibernation.