Darn bears!

I went out this morning and noticed the birdfeeder wasn't hanging in the tree. I figured maybe the wind had blown it out. Well, not wind this time. Apparently a bear decided to have a little snack last night. I finally found the birdfeeder - waaaaay across the yard. And they pulled down the big seedcake holder and ate the big birdseed cake and ran off with a suet feeder. I still haven't found that suet holder.

It has to have been a bear, wind or other critters couldn't have carried that feeder so far or eaten an entire big seedcake in one sitting.

Note: I will cease immediately complaining about the squirrels eating all the seed....yikes!!

probably sitting in the woods with the suet holder stuck in its teeth, well, probably crushed it and sucked it like a lollipop. EEEK

OH I love seeing the Bears, always a treat when we go up to my Dad's camp. But...... glad they don't come down this far. I guess I should say glad they don't come down this far yet. There have been several encounters with bears in a heavily populated area just 20 minutes north of us. They were way out of their normal area. Poor things, one had to be shot.
Be careful Hart, do you get them often?

They're in the forest all around us. I've seen them when I was driving, never seen one in the yard although I've seen signs they were here.

One of my neighbors a few years ago put his trash in the back of his SUV planning on taking it to the transfer station the next morning. Got up the next day and a bear had broken into his SUV to get at the trash. Tore it all up.

I hope the suet holder is stuck in his teeth. I'd like to kick his furry behind.

Front Royal gets a lot of critters moseying down from Shenandoah National Park. Joyce heard a noise at her back door one night and peeked out the back door. There was a bear peeking in at her. He was after her birdseed and hummingbird feeders too. He got into her water garden too. Didn't eat the fish thank goodness but he splashed a lot of water out.

Anyway, I've certainly never had any knocking at the back door. LOL

Fortunately our feeders are on the deck so I probably won't have to worry about them crawling up the steps to get them! I've heard about bears in the area and have seen photos in the local paper of those that have been shot but never thought they were that close! Last fall, one of the men we allow to hunt on the property came to the front door all excited - he had seen evidence of bear at the nursery!!! I wasn't convinced until he showed us the proof. Now mind you, this guy is about as red neck, back woods as they get, as well as missing a few teeth! He jumps back in the truck, pulls out his laptop???? and shows us the pictures of the prints he took - how scary is that? Not the bear prints but a good 'ole home boy with laptop in his truck? The "locals" never cease to amaze me :) LOL Heck, and all I thought I had to worry about were the rattlers and coppers!

I've never seen signs of a bear in my area. Old timers say they used to see them, but I guess they've long since moved their habitat elsewhere. Wonder why - there is still so much fairly unpopulated woodland here. Rotten for a bear to take your birdfeeders, and how startled Joyce must have been coming eye to eye with one at her door!!!

We had excitement several years ago when a small (?) black bear was seen in the area of new construction at Arundel Mills Mall, deep in suburban wasteland, MD. . I personally felt it was a sign we shouldn't have built that mall but nobody else seemed to think so.

LOL the laptop !!

OMG - BEARS, hart? Someone sent me a photo "forward" (yeah, the dreaded forward) of a bear going for a bird feeder - it was amazing. Will try to locate it.

I've had raccoons take down suet feeders and drag them down to the "south 40", as well as the corn feeder I'd put up in the dogwood tree to distract the pesky varmint squirrels, found that back under a tree. Thankfully, we are just a little too developed here for anything besides the occasional deer or two passing through.

LOVE the laptop story - that is a hoot!

Bear photos!


Found 'em - here's the first one...

Second photo - can you imagine seeing this?

Alllllmost there! We are still wondering what sort of rope that was...

Success!

As the friend who forwarded this one said, this must be either an Alaskan Squirrel or a Texas one. LOL!

They are quite interesting pictures Diva. Thank you for sharing them with us.

Oh my gosh Hart, be careful. Maybe the company who sells the Snake Away makes Bear Away. ha-ha I don't know, what would prevent them from coming around. We too live at the base of The Skyline Parkway and bears roam these mountains too.

If I had been Joyce looking out of the window and saw a bear, I would have probably had a heart attack right at that moment. Man, oh man.

Thanks for sharing this story with us Hart.

Ruby

I know when the bears were being a particular problem in Front Royal a few years ago, the animal control guy said the best way to keep them out of your yard is to take down all the birdfeeders, make sure trashcans are secure, there is no other animal food outside and otherwise just deprive them of whatever food is luring them there.

I don't have anything out there attracting them except the birdfeeders. I hate to take them down because so many birds are depending on them. I think I have them up high enough that a bear can't reach them now. Marshall said if that doesn't work, he can put them up even higher.

I'm sure they couldn't climb that tree to get to them, too, because of the size of the tree and the way it's growing. No place to get a foot or claw hold.

Those bear photos are hilarious. That is one resourceful, determined bear. LOL

I have one more bear story. The lady I bought the house from was driving through the national forest on her way home one day. Up at the mouth of the fort, there are mountains on both sides and just a narrow passage where the road cuts though.

There was a young teenager in his father's car in front of her, and all of a sudden a bear just dropped down out of the sky (he was climbing the rocks above) and fell onto the hood of the boy's car. Needless to say, the hood was extremely bent up.

She stopped to make sure he was okay, left her number in case he needed a witness for insurance. He called her later to have her tell his father what she saw - his father thought he was making up this ridiculous story about falling bears to cover up whatever he'd really done to dent up the car. LOL

The bear was apparently fine and shuffled off into the woods.

Texas squirrels!!!!!!!!!!! LOL

I've seen signs for falling rocks but not falling bears!!!!!!!!! LOL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHI0Cz3JjbM

Loved the pictures, Diva. Some smart bear, however he would not have been happy if the rope broke. Ouch!

That was a cute bear stoty too Hart. Thanks for the cartoon Chris. Good to have some morning laughs.

Ruby

Glad y'all enjoyed the bear photos - I thought they were pretty amazing, and I don't THINK they were faked.

ladygardener1, I think one of the comments that came along with the bear photos was something like "WHAT is that rope made of!!!?". That bear had to be pretty hungry to do the high-wire act to get some birdseed, and I'm thinking he (she?) would have been mightily annoyed if the rope had broken. Of course, if it had indeed broken, that would mean the feeder would come down too. ;-)

hart, that falling bear story is just too funny! Can you imagine your teenager coming home with a story like that? LOL!

Love the pictures and your bear story, hart, reminds me of my poor sister shortly after she got her driver's license. She and her friends were playing hookey from school and sneaking off to my parents' cottage one afternoon - the electric company was working on the lines and the transformer fell on her car when she was passing under it!!! Thankfully no one was hurt, but I'm not sure if my father was more ticked off about the damage to the car or the fact that she was somewhere she wasn't supposed to be - busted!! LOL

If a transformer or a bear is going to fall out of the sky, you can guarantee it's going to fall onto the car of the teenager out driving where they're not supposed to be. LOL

Well, the bear came back last night, broke the limb off the tree and got the birdfeeder and suet holder again. I guess I'm going to have to just stop feeding the birds until he gives up and goes elsewhere for his snacks.

Oh gosh, hart... Sorry it's come back. I think you're absolutely right in pulling in the feeders for a while. The birds will be OK, but I know you'll miss them.

Does the bear destroy the feeders? I can't imagine how it would get the suet and birdseed without seriously damaging the feeders... Just envisioning claws and teeth, and SIZE... yikes.

As Chantell said much earlier, this sure puts squirrel problems in perspective!

Good luck.......Barb

Dang....that is some ROPE..sheesh

Hart, So sorry that your Bear is back I was hoping it would move on. They can really cover some territory maybe he will move on in search of a mate.

I wondered about those photos. A bear, and that's a big bear, is really heavy. Seems like the rope would either break or at least be pulled down more from the bear's weight. And any of those photos would be easy to fake in Photoshop. According to this site (scroll way down almost to the bottom) it is a fake and was photoshopped.
http://selever.freeshell.org/projects/rand/

Luckily the bird and suet feeders survived the encounters, other than the suet feeder it apparently took home with it. The birdfeeder has a top that lifts off for filling so it had no problem getting at the seed. The wire suet and seedcake feeders aren't that hard to open either.

What's amazing is how quiet he's been. We've been really listening for him and the birdfeeders are pretty close to the house so you'd think we'd have heard something. Not a sound.

Wow - good detective work, hart! I'll send that link back to the person who forwarded those pix.

Amazing, and a little scary (in the sense that you could go out and encounter the bear!!!) that it's so quiet when it's rustling your seeds & suet.

When I read that link, there's an update at the top that says, "it is possible that my entire analysis was incorrect!".
It was edited, but he can't say how - it may have been just to crop, or something. I use rope at work to lift things that are much heavier than any black bear, I don't doubt those pics are real at all.

I know rope can lift heavy things, but I'll bet you don't lift anything from the center of a rope strung across two trees. It's possible it's not even a single length of rope but one that's tied to the birdfeeder on either side. That's not a baby bear and I'm sure it would have pulled the rope down a lot more than what the photos show, even if the rope was pulled tight between the trees.

Super dooper climbing rope might take the weight but it would be a lot thicker than the rope in those photos and it would still pull down from the weight of a bear.

Anyway, I think it's fake. Sure you could use Photoshop just to crop the photos but you could also very likely use it to fake the photos too.

The second picture really looks fake to me after studying it a bit. If you look closely the rope is not coming out from the paw on the left side. Also the bears butt and feet look like he could have been sitting on something, I remember seeing bears in the zoo sitting up and begging for peanuts that looked like that, same position.

For me it's the first picture that looks most fake. He seems to be floating in the tree with one paw on the rope.
Where are the Mythbuster guys on this one?? They need ideas!

I have a funny bear story to relate. I have family that live in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. Three of the relatives' houses are set about 1/2 mile apart. One night, a bear got in and ransacked the trash in the enclosed porches on each of the end houses, but totally bypassed the one in the middle. As they were comparing stories the next morning, the relative in the middle house was speculating why her house was skipped. One of the little ones piped up so innocently - "the bear must know about Kathy's cooking and figured that there wouldn't be anything good to find in her trash". Kathy is a notoriously awful cook, but I don't think it had actually been the butt of family jokes before :-) Thank goodness she took it with good humor. Out of the mouths of babes LOL! Terri

LOL now THAT'S a good one!!!

Terri, That is a good one. LOL
Ok I have one too. We quite often see bears up at my Dad's Camp. It is illegal to feed bears but there is a very large rock out back and sometimes excess food gets left there. There is also no inside bathroom at my Dad's camp just a pretty comfortable outhouse. Two seater with divider, heat and light. Ric's sitting in the outhouse, we are all inside playing cards. I get up to get a drink and see that there is a bear out at the rock. Maybe 10ft from the outhouse. Ric had to sit out there for quite a long time before we call and let him know the bear was gone.

Okay, Ric wins the bear hardship award!! LOL That's better than the mouse falling down into my SIL's pants inside the creepy old outhouse at the campground while visiting our inlaws one year. She about tore the outhouse apart getting out of there, not to mention no one knew quite what to do about these screams coming from inside the outhouse. So I guess he wins the funny outhouse story award too. LOL

That's so cute about Kathy the bad cook too. You know, I'm sure the little girl had it all figured out, logically. LOL