A bear hopped on a SC woman’s porch so she used her ‘teacher voice.’ See what happened next

If you’ve wrangled 25-plus kids in a classroom for years, what’s one bear on a porch?

Debbie Tomlinson of Simpsonville knew what to do when she saw a mama bear going for her bird feeders on her porch at her family’s vacation home in Sapphire Valley, North Carolina.

She used her teacher voice — that coaxing, but oh-so-firm voice — so many of us heard through our school years. She taught 10th grade English at Southside High before her children were born and went back after her two children were older as a substitute at other middle and high schools in Greenville County.

She is retired now and Tomlinson and her husband Lee consider their Sapphire Valley condo their happy place. They have a condo at North Litchfield, too, but Debbie says the heat gets to her.

The condo overlooks the valley with the mountains beyond, and the Tomlinsons often see bears and other wildlife. Once before, something was on the porch, which is on the second floor of a six-unit building, but Tomlinson thinks it was most likely a raccoon.

She usually brings her three bird feeders inside at dusk but the other day she did not. That’s when a wise and wily bear saw them and came calling.

The bear left her cub on the ground, shimmied up a post and gingerly walked along the railing toward the feeders.

Lee Tomlinson saw her and called out to his wife, who in a moment of perfect clarity turned on her cell phone camera.

Then she knocked twice on the glass door. Mama bear slipped, but kept on. So Debbie Tomlinson opened the door and said, “Get down from there. Get down from there, right now,” and continued talking in that teacher voice as the mama bear backed down the way she came.

“How dare you,” she said at one point and when the bear gets to the ground she says for good measure, “I see you.”

Tomlinson is used to critters coming around. At her home in Simpsonville, she feeds feral cats. She traps them and has them fixed then turns them out again. She feeds six now. Once, she captured on her outdoor camera a cat, an opossum and a raccoon side by side eating cat food.

“They’re all friends,” she said. “They pass in the night.”

Tomlinson said it didn’t cross her mind that the bear might charge or that she was in any danger.

“When you have a wayward child you know what voice to use,” she said.

Same goes for wayward bears, and she really didn’t want to lose her feeders.

This story was originally published July 19, 2022 at 1:09 PM.