Bear Troubles

I always knew there would be positives and negatives to moving both moving to Washington and to moving up into a more rural location. Honestly, the positives are amazing, and the negatives are small and inconsequential. With one exception.

We’ve known there were bears in the area since last fall, when they started hauling my feeders off into the woods to eat at their leisure. As we’ve moved into spring, they have ended their hibernation and we’ve been seeing one visit overnight via the security cameras. To prevent them from seeing us as a reliable food source and encouraging them to visit more often, we bring the feeders in at dusk and so they’re not available for random munchers. That’s worked pretty well, until last Friday. What you see here is a younger bear (I think first season away from mom) grabbing the suet feeder — at 2:30 in the afternoon. He ate standing up for a while, got bored, and pulled it down and hauled the feeder into the woods to finish at leisure.

A bit disconcerting is that I’d been working on something on the patio about 15 feet from those feeders about an hour earlier, but had finished and gone to teh garage to start a different project, and then hear Laurie yell “your feeders are down!” - the security camera tells the story.

I had pondered many things about moving to this property, but “it is too rural for bird feeders” was not one of them. As of right now, I’m leaving the feeders inside for a week (and I’ve had to order another suet feeder, my, um, fifth, I think), and the stand needs some repair, but I also have to start pondering whether even daylight feeders make sense, or how often I’m willing to have them trashed to keep them operating.

The engineer in my immediately started designing bear proof feeder setups, involving running a cable from the house here to that tree there, and with pulleys and ropes that would let me raise the feeders higher off the ground out of reach, and…. And I really don’t want it to get to that point, you know? I am hoping it won’t get to that point.

or at least allow me to get some good pictures?

I honestly hadn’t thought I might end up in an ongoing way with Yogi over my picnic basket…

The Feeders

The feeders, by the way, are going gangbusters (when outside). We’ve had a pair of Western Tanagers move in, along with a flock of American Goldfinches, and we have the first Dark-Eyed Junco chicks fledged and coming to visit in their clueless “how does this work” way. I’ve seen some purple martins flying over head and have a house up for them, but I haven’t seen any signof interest there yet (it’s been less than a week), and while the chickadees checked out one of the other houses I’ve put up, so far, nobody’s signed a lease. I’m pretty sure we have Purple Finches, Red-Breasted Nuthatches, Robins, Spotted Towhees, American Goldfinches and Pine Siskins nesting on the property, and at least while the suet feeder is up, we’ve had a Pileated Woodpecker move in, and we’re seeing Northern Flickers again. I did a fairly careful feederwatch recently, and logged 14 species for the day. My latest new yard bird was a quick but good look at a Swainson’s Thrush, and in spending a bit of time trying to ID the swallows that are flying overhead, I had a Bald Eagle cross the property about 25’ up, and then I noticed a kettle of them enjoying a lazy wander (at least six) up at altitude, and then watched a Raven fly up to harrass them, just because. It is, with nesting and hormones going on, that time of year where birds will protect their territory and nest, even when nobody is threatening them… We had single Golden-Crowned and White-Crowned Sparrows visit for a day or two, but both were pretty clearly just taking a break in migration and didn’t stick, and weren’t part of the more typical flock.

Here are a few of my favorite “out the window” shots from my office…