MARIETTA, Ga. -- Families in the Cobb County neighborhoods off of Due West Rd. NW and Dallas Highway near Marietta love the woods and wildlife behind their homes.

But they're not so taken with what they saw come out of the woods Monday night, the second night in a row.

It's a big, hungry, Georgia Black Bear.

"It was a bear!" said one of the homeowners, Jack Hogsed. "We had a Black Bear come into the neighborhood. Last night [Sunday night] is the first time we have ever seen anything like that out here," and Monday night he and a neighbor saw it again.

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His family has lived on the property for a hundred years.

Not until Monday morning did Hogsed and his wife realize that the bear had come onto their property the night before.

They were looking at photos that their digital wildlife camera had taken Sunday night.

They often set up the camera in their backyard, pointed toward the woods. The camera has a motion detector to trigger the electronic shutter, and it has infrared imaging to photograph wildlife at night, without the need for a disruptive flash. They recently bought the camera and have been collecting photos of the deer and wild turkeys and other mammals and birds that call those 50 acres of the Hogsed woods home.

So Monday morning they were trying to figure out what sort of animal had been in the backyard the night before -- because whatever it was had been able to bend their tall, metal bird feeder stands toward the ground in order to eat all the bird seed.

"I got the memory stick out, put it in my computer," Hogsed said, "and I started looking. And I said a couple of very, not nice words, and I said, 'It was a bear!'"

Hogsed went back outside and looked again at his bent and ravaged bird feeders. On the feeder that has a wooden roof, he could see a big, muddy, smeared paw print on the top of it.

Recently, one of Hogsed's neighbors, Tricia Fortson, saw that her own metal bird feeder stands in her backyard had been bent toward the ground, and one of the feeders was even torn from the stand and carried into the next yard.

Now she suspects it was their neighborhood Black Bear.

"I think it's kind of scary to think there's a bear in your back yard," she said with a laugh. She and her family have lived in the house since it was built 25 years ago and had never seen a bear, there. "Never would I have thought there was a bear back there. Never."

The time-stamps on Hogsed's photos show that the bear appeared at about 8:30 Sunday night and stayed until about 11:00 pm. Then, at about 8:00 Monday night, Hogsed and Fortson saw the bear with their own eyes -- and they said they think it's the same bear but really have no way of knowing for certain.

"I saw the bear again in the yard at 8:05 pm heading toward Due West Road," Hogsed wrote in an email to 11Alive News a few minutes after that. "We watched him cross Due West Road and head toward Old Hamilton Road."

"It was in the woods about 30 feet from my property line," Fortson wrote, "and it went to Hogsed's backyard. I called them and they watched it cross Due West Road. So now it's not just a bear in a picture, but a real LIVE bear!"

Cobb County Police Sgt. Craig Dong said Monday afternoon that he knows of three sightings of bears a year ago in that area.

"I think there's just more construction and maybe they're just getting pushed into civilization more than they were before," Fortson said.

The state Department of Natural Resources estimates that, after a "serious population decline," the bears have "recovered to a healthy population of at least 5,100" in Georgia.

There is no record of Black Bears harming anyone in Georgia, according to the DNR website, but there have been "two documented fatal Black Bear attacks in the Southeastern United States."

They're just not spotted so close to the human habitats of Metro Atlanta very often.

Georgia DNR's Wildlife Resources Division says that game management offices across the state receive several bear nuisance calls every year. DNR usually recommends that people simply take away from their yards bird feeders, pet food, unsecured garbage and other potential "attractants," and the bears will stop coming around after a few of days.

"All they're doing is foraging for food," Hogsed said. "The wildlife really don't have any place else to go. And we understand that. It's just that I don't want to come nose-to-nose with a bear in the middle of the night in my yard.... I will never put bird seed out, close to the ground, again. Probably what I'll do is hang the bird feeders up in the tree I have behind me, here."

And then he just may have a bear in the tree.

"Probably," he said with a laugh.