My name is not given in the blotter. The blotter identifies me as "a bear," and on three consecutive weeks it has noted my presence in the hedgerow along the east side of the Holiday Inn Express on Cleveland Road, and on each of those occasions it has noted, in the incident remarks column, that responding officers advised me to move along. I want to respond to those three entries.

The first thing I want to say is that I am not doing anything wrong.

I am a black bear. I am, by the most current field survey conducted by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, one of approximately 900 black bears in the North Georgia Blue Ridge range. I have a documented home range of approximately 80 square miles that extends from the Unicoi State Park bottomland north through the Anna Ruby Falls corridor and down through the eastern ridgeline into the areas of what I understand you call the Helen commercial district. This is not a territory I chose arbitrarily. This is my range. It has been my range, and the range of my predecessors, since before the specific cluster of Alpine-style buildings currently occupying Bruckenstrasse was constructed.

The Holiday Inn Express hedge is, specifically, within that range.

I have been living in and around that hedge since late September, which is when the mast crop on the upper Unicoi ridge became insufficient for my pre-denning caloric requirements and I moved lower. This is standard behavior. This is, I want to be clear, not aberrant behavior. The Georgia DNR's own management guidelines describe this seasonal movement pattern in their 2019 Black Bear Management Plan, which I have had occasion to become familiar with, in the sense that it has been read aloud in my vicinity by a wildlife officer on two of the three occasions referenced in the blotter. I am, apparently, the subject of active educational outreach from the state of Georgia.

I appreciate the outreach. I do not, on that basis, intend to move.

Let me explain the hedge specifically. The Holiday Inn Express hedge is an established Leyland cypress screen approximately 14 feet tall and 40 feet in continuous length, planted along the property's east wall sometime in the early 2000s, and it creates, at its base, a sheltered corridor approximately three feet wide with good drainage, wind break on three sides, and reasonable concealment from the parking lot. It is, from a bear's perspective, a functional denning-adjacent rest site. It is not my primary den. My primary den is on the north-facing slope approximately two miles east, up a drainage I will not describe in more detail, for reasons that should be obvious. The Holiday Inn Express hedge is a waypoint. I use it in the afternoons when the commercial district foraging is active and the parking lot north of Cleveland Road is loud.

It is, in short, a reasonable place to rest between foraging periods.

I understand that my presence in the hedge has alarmed certain guests. The blotter's first entry, dated three weeks prior, notes a "report from a guest" regarding "a large animal in the hedge." I was, at the time, resting. I was not displaying any threat behavior. I was not approaching any person. I was in the hedge, which is, as I have now described at some length, a hedge that is functionally within my foraging corridor, on property that is adjacent to a drainage that connects directly to Unicoi State Park, which is itself designated wildlife habitat. The hedge is practically in the park. If you draw a line from my primary den to the Unicoi boat launch, the Holiday Inn Express hedge is approximately at the midpoint.

The second entry, the following week, notes that "the bear from last week's report" was again observed in the hedge at approximately 6:40 in the morning, and that a responding officer "spoke to the bear and it moved briefly before returning." I want to address this directly. I moved because a uniformed officer approached me at close range and I made a risk assessment. The risk assessment resolved in favor of brief movement. I then returned to the hedge because the hedge is where I was going to be that morning and the officer, having completed the interaction from his perspective, left. From my perspective, the matter was concluded. I was back in the hedge within approximately 40 minutes.

The third entry, which I found most troubling in terms of tone, describes me as a "recurring problem animal." I object to this characterization. I am not a problem. I am a bear. These are not the same thing. A problem animal, in DNR terminology, is an animal that has learned to seek human food sources, that approaches humans non-defensively, or that has demonstrated a pattern of property damage. I have not done any of these things. I have never approached a human who was not first approaching me. I have not damaged the hedge. I have, to my knowledge, consumed nothing at the Holiday Inn Express that was not naturally occurring — the ornamental plantings along the east face have some residual fruiting-body activity that I make use of, but this is opportunistic foraging, not human-food dependency. There is a meaningful distinction.

I am not a problem animal. I am a bear who has a hedge.

I am also aware, because it was mentioned by the wildlife officer during the second visit, that the Helen Police Department has filed a notice with the White County DNR office requesting a relocation assessment. I want to address this as well. Relocation, in the context of a bear with an established 80-square-mile home range that includes most of the Unicoi drainage and a substantial portion of the Anna Ruby Falls corridor, is not a simple operation. You cannot relocate me to a place that is outside my range. My range is, in practical terms, the entire north Georgia Blue Ridge. You can move me. I will return. This is not stubbornness. This is geography.

I also want to address, briefly, the guest at the Holiday Inn Express who, according to the third blotter entry, photographed me from the second-floor window and posted the photograph to an unspecified social media platform with the caption "omg there is literally a bear in the bushes." I saw you. You were in the window with the broken shade, room 214, for approximately seven minutes. I did not move. You were not in danger. You were, from my vantage point, standing in a lit room at a distance of perhaps 30 feet, looking at a bear who was resting in a hedge. This is a thing that happens in Helen, Georgia, a town that is located in the southern Appalachian range, which is black bear habitat. If you did not want to be near a bear, I would, with respect, suggest that rooms overlooking the Leyland cypress hedge at a hotel in the mountains of Georgia may not be the ideal choice.

I intend to continue using the hedge through approximately late March, at which point my foraging patterns will shift back to the upper Unicoi ridge as the late-winter food sources develop. I will be back in the fall. I am telling you this not as a threat but as information. Plan accordingly.

The hedge is not the problem. The hedge is the solution. I am in the hedge because the hedge is there, and the hedge is there because someone planted it, and I was here, in this range, long before anyone planted anything.

I am a bear. This is what I wanted you to know.

— Anonymous Local Bear