On the chance that you don't list among your ready talents something in the way of trend-spotting, let's go live to the forest for what's become, I'm afraid, the same, simple sorry story.

At least, it's a trend.

Pennsylvania's world-class trophy bears do nothing the entire fall but lie around with their world-class trophy wives, waiting to become world-class rugs and carcasses for some of the state's 100,000 hunters.

Then they wake up on Thanksgiving, noonish, notice that more than 3,000 of them are missing, and wonder why it's taking so long for the bears they can't find to get back from the Sheetz with the pastries.

Trailing by the depressingly typical score of 1,005-0 after the first period in Pennsylvania's three-day bear season, the team with an ecological losing streak so long it predates the very definition of rivalry was actually encouraged at one point this week over news that the "harvest" (carnage) was down by about 30 percent from the first day last year.

Naturally, the bears don't believe in moral victories, mostly because the bears, as ever, are getting killed.

Instant analysis filling the occasional silences between gun blasts held that the hunters were struggling offensively due to the sometimes spotty availability of fall foods (for the bears, obviously). One studio analyst, first-year gabber Bill Cowbear, paraphrased Game Commission intelligence succinctly: "The yield of red oaks was below normal. Beechnuts are rated average to poor. Gypsy moth defoliation and below-average rainfall also appear to have affected the distribution of food in some areas, prompting premature ripening and nut-drop."

Nut-drop?

C'mon Bill; this isn't about nut-drop.

This is about preparation. It's about the hundreds of ways in which the Game Commission has helped the hunters to game plan, from making licenses available on line to posting county-by-county field reports on bear activities (Fayette: three bears drinking 40-ouncers in a clearing south of Hopwood, Nov. 6, one wearing a Polamalu jersey. Could be standard Tuesday ritual).

Right, and I don't have to tell you what yesterday was.

The hunters always have been effective at the point of attack, and the identifiable points of attack have exploded over the past couple of years thanks to this very strain of Internet instruction. Hunters are coached to look for droppings, bedding areas (scratched out depressions), claw marks on tree trunks, and worn photos of Dick Butkus and George Wendt.

The Game Commission is not exactly a dispassionate arbiter in the modern Hunters-Bears series, because the more bear corpses that turn up this week, the fewer complaints that figure to get phoned in over the next 12 months about bears turning over the garbage, snoring on porch swings, and hogging the remote control. No wonder the Web site is crammed with information on how to beat the bears that is more nuanced and more effective than ever. One recommendation is as follows:

"Organized drives are effective (wait, have the Steelers been to this site?). Hunters working together often increase the odds of taking bears, especially bears holding out in thick cover. Develop plans to safely drive likely bear hideouts and follow them to the letter. A minor slip-up by a driver, flanker or stander is all a bear needs to elude even the best-planned drive."

Not only positional advice right there, but a veritable blueprint on how to attack the thick cover 2.

Meanwhile, what have the bears been doing by way of preparation, besides coaxing one raggedy male to try and pass himself off as Bigfoot on the Internet? Well, nothing, unless you count the other thing Bears do in the woods, which is try to expand the roster toward a more equitable balance with the hunters. Again, there are 100,000 hunters; there are about 15,000 bears. At last count, though, bears in Pennsylvania were reproducing at a younger age and having larger litters than anywhere else in the United States, further calling into question the effectiveness of federally funded abstinence only programs, if nothing else.

Despite all of this, uh, roster expansion, it has led only meant to more lopsided results. The hunters' seven largest "harvests" have come in the past seven years, and the morning line this time was bears plus 3,100. The shooting stops at around dusk today, and despite coming out flat, the hunters figure to cover.

More than ever, the bears need the kind of leadership that can focus on the opposition the way the current staff focuses on bird-feeders. The bears need a tech-savvy alpha male who can analyze hunter tendencies and create a comprehensive data base augmented by video evidence of drive signals, who won't flinch if such evidence needs to be collected illegally.

Is there a Bear Belichick in the den?