October 25, 2010

• Last Summer’s Bear Visits

  Currently, sleet is falling noisily into the layer of dry leaves on the ground.  Leaves have been off the trees for weeks.  Snow is in the forecast.  These images are NOT showing current conditions, but those in my yard in July and August this year.

  I am just now getting photos from last summer cropped, resized and uploaded because I am learning by baby steps to use our new photo processing software.  Doug downloaded this software because, he said, PhotoShop was too “bloated” in terms of system resources.  This, after he had originally sold me on PhotoShop because of its versatility (“bloat” in his current opinion).   At that time, I had been contentedly using the simple software that came with my old point-and-shoot Kodak, my first digital camera.  Ah, well, they say that learning new things will help keep Alzheimer’s at bay.

  The photos below were captured with my Fuji FinePix S602Zoom, whose multifarious multiplex features I am still learning.  I now have yet another digital camera, a little Nikon CoolPix that Greyfox acquired at a yard sale for $5.00.  It had corroded batteries stuck in it, a situation I was able quickly to correct with tweezers, Q-tips and white vinegar.  Very soon, Greyfox determined that learning to use it was too much trouble, and gave it to me.  However, it has minuscule internal memory and I keep neglecting to order a new memory card for it.  When I do, I’ll have still more mental exercise for my anti-Alzheimer’s efforts.

  

  On the bear’s first visit to my yard last July, it chomped into a storage tub (above) that is filled with wood chips and pieces that I had picked up around the chopping block and saved for dry kindling.  I noticed the bite mark in the tub only later, my attention having been captured at first by the water jug below, which had been moved from the far side of the porch and left where I almost stumbled over it coming out my front door.

  

  I don’t know whether the bear was a black or a grizzly.  A big sow griz with two or three cubs (or one with two and another with three) had been sighted in the area, and black bears had been seen around here as well.  By measuring the distance between fang holes in the purple tub, I estimated the width of the bear’s lower jaw at about 5 inches.

  Around this time, I became attuned to night sounds.  Neighborhood dogs were barking a lot, and there were gunshots going off in several directions, late into the night.  Some of my neighbors have motion sensors on their yard lights, and I can picture some guy being awakened by dogs barking, grabbing his rifle or shotgun and blasting away, either at shadows or at actual bears.

  Each morning for a while, I would find new signs that a bear or bears had come through my yard.  I had been propagating Siberian wild strawberries, training runners into ten to twelve-inch containers after discovering accidentally that they grew much larger that way than in the ground, and that the berries were not only bigger and more numerous, but also dangled high enough off the ground to escape being nibbled by snails and small rodents.  I don’t recall how many times — at least 4 or 5 — I righted overturned pots in the morning, tended flattened strawberry plants, and smoothed out paw prints in the pots (below).

  

  The bear(s) apparently used my garden path at least some of the time.  It is entirely likely that the path, which existed before I moved in here, had been originally made by bears.  It meanders like a bear trail through the woods.  However, in some places the bear’s new trail diverged from the old path, off through tall stands of fireweed.  All the weeds and wildflowers around the compost heap in my back yard had been beaten flat by the first of August.

  Besides browsing through the compost, the bear(s) tasted some of my potted bunching onions, but apparently did not like the flavor.  None of the onions was dug or pulled up, nor were they bitten off near ground level — just tasted and left.

  

  I have no photos to show you the havoc and demolition of the bear’s final visit last August.  That morning, I went out, watered and groomed the hanging baskets of nasturtiums on my front porch (photos another day, probably – they have not been saved from my camera yet) then went back in and rested before following the path out to the strawberries and beyond, to the rhubarb.  When I finally did get as far as the strawbs, all was chaos:  pots tumbled every which way, including my only potato plant, which had been in its own big (5 gallon) pot perched up on a fallen log off the trail in a supposedly safe place.

  Not even thinking about documenting the damage, I just started picking things up, straightening bent-over plants, righting upturned pots, as I followed the path toward the rhubarb garden.  Then, about midway along the path, I found the first bear dropping.  A bit farther on, I found a scattering of bear scat, then more, extending over a distance of about thirty feet along the path.  This was weird, highly unusual, to see bear shit dropped as if the bear was running and going at the same time.  Usually, it is found in piles, looking much like human excrement.

  More shocks were waiting for me in the rhubarb area.  My ‘barb is in raised planters made of chicken wire lined with poly sheeting.  Every one of them had been dug into, roots exposed, wire bent down and soil scattered.  I had a small conifer in a big pot sitting atop one such raised planter, a huge spread of trailing nasturtium growing from another, and several potted clumps of Shasta daisies.  All those pots had been knocked about, scattered as if in a rage of destruction.

  I had heard a lot of shooting and dogs barking the previous night, beginning somewhere southwest of here and ending up to the north.  The scenario I pieced together from the evidence was that the bear had been wounded and/or pursued by dogs, perhaps surprised in the act of digging up my rhubarb roots.  It was evidently fleeing through my yard.  Later on, talking to neighbors and reconstructing events, we more or less concluded that this had been the bear shot by Joe, who lives at the end of our block to the north.  Anyhow, that was the last evidence of bears in my yard this year.

  

  • 5:42 pm
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