This morning, a little before eight, my cat once again spotted our visitor before we did. And once again, I grabbed for my camera but also took the noise maker (cow bell) with me. I hurried out on to the front deck and managed to get only one shot on camera before he turned to look at me with one paw still on the trash can. I then rang the bell and shouted and the bear went back down on all fours never getting to open the trash cover.
This bear seemed to be a bit larger than the one that visited last time. I shot this other picture while the bear was leaving.
In keeping with his daily routine, a couple of hours later, Don went down the driveway with the kitchen trash in one hand and the ammonia spray bottle in the other. A comical sight in itself, but a more hilarious ending to throwing out the trash was me following behind him ringing the cow bell all the way down to the road. Now, I wish I had a picture of that!
Hi Margaret, You and Don have the right idea! My brother-in-law places a pan of table scraps out every evening after dinner for bears or raccoons up in the mountains where they live. I have explicitly mentioned the inherent nature of a hand fed bear to them since I have been around many in my native central Pennsylvanian upbringing. (I say hand fed, to mean placing food out for them as opposed to them raiding trash cans)
ReplyDeleteI have seen incidents where bears that were continually fed, came one day when the people were away. Seems they failed to remember to leave the feed out for the bear and he simply tore the door off the house and entered their kitchen and demolished it.
It is never a good idea to encourage bears to hang around for the entertainment of friends and visitors because they are powerful and nasty when annoyed or God forbid, you come between Mamma and her cub. You and Don do the right thing...encourage they go away! EVERYTIME. Skip