Giant black bear walks into photo shoot at Biltmore Estate

I've already written about the Biltmore Estate. If you are in North Carolina near Asheville then you definitely should go and see it. USA doesn't have any castles, but if they were to have one, this would be it. It's not much for defenses but it is an extremely impressive set of houses and grounds.

It is just a tourist attraction now because no private owners want to live in it due to the incredible upkeep costs of the old estate but it is totally worth it to go there and imagine that it was like to have such opulence.

One couple was doing something there recently and one of those things was to do a wedding something or other, I think it was a proposal, when a creature that we don't often see in North Carolina just wandered into the background.

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That thing is pretty far away and I guess this couple and everyone else that was there is lucky that it is. Black bears, from what I understand, are not as aggressive or territorial as Grizzly or Polar bears are, but I am still kind of shocked by the rather nonchalant way that a lot of the people are just standing around and not seeking shelter.

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I guess they are standing near the wall over there hoping that they could just jump over it if the bear approached them. Black bears are not normally known to go after humans - I've lived here my entire life and have never heard of such a thing - but that doesn't change the fact that if they wanted to, especially one of this size, it could paw-slap-kill you in one swipe.

Thankfully, none of the people tried to do anything stupid like get really close for a TikTok and get their face ripped off in the process.

I did learn something interesting because of this incident though and that is that the Biltmore estate has 8000 acres of wildlife preserve and that is no joke. That's 32 million square meters or 12 and a half square miles.

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I've lived in North Carolina for over 40 years. I spend a lot of time in nature, yet I have never seen one of these guys and I wonder why that is. According to the internet the black bears faced extinction in the 20th century but there were widespread rejuvenation efforts and now there is an estimated 30,000 of them in the state (good work!). They are mostly in two areas: One is the mountainous areas around Asheville and hence, how it ended up in the picture at the Biltmore, and another kind of surprised me because it sort of surrounds where I live in the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula. Upon further investigation though there are only around 8000 bears in this area and the area is rather huge. I can only guess that there must be some protected areas and I don't know about them because they are protected and probably fenced in.

No matter. I like bears probably because I have never had to deal with them on any sort of regular basis. It's a good thing that this particular bear incident didn't turn ugly because I don't think the Biltmore has any methods of dealing with some sort of wild bear that gets some bloodlust.

What a wonderful day for that couple. They will definitely remember this part of their marriage or engagement or whatever the hell it was.