Bearly Averted Thanksgiving Disaster

Wow, what a story Kathleen! That would be too much excitement for me. I hope your partner is able to sleep tonight, the poor guy. I'm glad everyone is safe though.

Thank God that nobody was harmed! You and you partner have much to be thankful for today!!!

Crikey! Poor goats!

Yeah, the goats were still shaking when I went in to calm them. They know they had a narrow escape. I feel sorry for the poor bear too. None of the photos came out but I'm posting this picture of him anyway. He has such a sad face.

Wow, Kathleen. And Thanksgiving is supposed to he a mellow day! Glad the goats and everyone else is safe!

Aaaw, what a sweet, sad looking bear face. But, yeah, you don't want him to think your home is an all-you-can-eat buffet. I hope you can find a peaceable solution, but it seems like you've consciously prepared to do what's needed, and I respect that.

OMG...how lucky you were!!! I don't like the part where you said you know he will be back!

I'd be placing cat food in strategic places to get more captures, once I made sure the other animals were safe. Well anyhow, as long as no one got hurt, it would definitely fill my memories as a very Happy Thanksgiving. Lots of luck Kathy-Best to you and yours :))

Kathleen, that was an exciting story. I love bears too, and have been close to one in my life...luckily it was a gentle soul and some of them are not.

I couldn't wait to get to the next paragraph, that must have been something. How is your partner doing?

The picture is stunning!

Thank you for sharing this story, you made my day, lol! Excellent adventure and I wish I could be there (with my camera of course) to see this to my own eyes :p I love animals, even bears... And this one looks like poor hungry but sweet puppy dog ;)

I hope you are safe :) Don't bears fear of noise made with sticks?

great image

Great story and great image!

Wow, what a story. And you managed to get such a great photo too!

So glad you are all OK!

- Richard Reeve
ReevePhotos.com

I love bears! I've spent quite a bit of time in wild places just observing black bears and grizzlies from what I'd hoped was a safe distance. They've always touched my heart. I've had some close encounters as well that could have gone horribly wrong but luckily the bears I've startled had no interest in hurting me. Even the time a male came barreling down the hill in a full out charge on my friend, he pulled up at the last second and whirled in place like the Tasmanian Devil in the cartoons. Flowers and rocks were flying everywhere and he was so close she could smell his breath but it was just a mock charge. I gained great respect for his restraint that day because I truly believed he was going to tear her apart right in front of me but he chose to make a different statement instead.

Maybe if bears were ugly or repulsive I could muster up some animosity toward them but they are such empathetic creatures. Any dog lover can see the doggy faces in bears and if you look in their eyes you can see such a range of very human emotions. And it was Thanksgiving, after all, when we share our bounty with others. It felt awful to drive him away but I had to make a choice between him and the animals who live here.

A couple years ago I hiked alone down a wooded mountain in the Canadian Rockies, just as the sun was going down. The place is infested with grizzlies and black bears and I had no business being there alone at dusk. I was trying to move as fast as I could without tripping over exposed roots so I could make it to my truck before full dark but that also made me look like prey to a hungry bear. I had miles to go and was in a panic so I made up a song that I sang out loud:

Oh, Mr. Bear I do declare
I mean no harm to you
Just passing through and on my way
Hope you’ve had a beary nice day.

Oh Mr. Bear how do you fare?
Is your salmon fat and served up rare?
Are the buffalo berries sweet or tart?
When you eat too many do they make you fart?

Oh Mr. Bear I am aware
I may be passing near your lair
with tooth and claw you could drag me there
but I’m tough and stringy and covered with hair.

Oh Mr. Bear don’t set a snare
cause I’m running down the mountain as fast as I dare
Let me out of these woods, please hear my prayer
and I won’t be back, I swear.

Oh Mr. Bear I'm in despair
‘cause it’s getting cold and dark out here.
If I could, I’d shine a flare
but the flashlight’s dead and I have no spare.

Oh Mr. Bear, is that your shadow up there
where those rumbling growls are filling the air?
Don’t kill me now cause it wouldn’t be fair
‘sides I’m tough and stringy and you’d gag on my hair.

Oh Mr. Bear is that my truck down there
where that big old moon is bouncing a glare?
Let me out of these woods, please hear my prayer
and I won’t come back, I swear.

I have a new respect for you, Kathleen Bishop as most people just talk about killing bears where I'm from and I also don't like the idea of killing bears because my one encounter left me unafraid as well.

I'm respectful of their size and I don't want to go up and pet one, but they seem to have a much worse reputation with hunters.

Well at least, Kathleen, we know you made it through the night! Will you be making the door to the goat house more secure? What do you do to prepare for a revisit of the bear? The scene with your friend on one side of the goat house door pushing against the bear on the other is funny and scary! Glad your friend came out alive, due to your pine cone throwing! Words have power and you don't major on fearful things bears are capable of and may be part of what saved your life in those incidents.

Lisa, I understand that culture. I live in Redneckland where guys who own big trucks with big tires and tote big guns (and coincidentally have teeny-tiny you-know-whats) hunt bears with packs of dogs to do their hunting. It turns my stomach.

I get that they are omnivores and some are pretty bad-tempered but most of the ones I've watched have been moms playing with their cubs or boars peacefully grazing like cows. I do have great respect for their speed, however. I was watching a sow eating berries along a stream. Her tiny cubs were playing quite a distance downstream. One of them looked up and didn't see Mama, so let out a squawk That mama whipped around and ran at full speed to her baby. It was good to see because I'd never imagined they could move so fast. If I'd been between her and them I would have been flattened.

Suzanne, that's a good question. I don't know of any kind of door that a bear couldn't rip open but that's not the worst of it. The whole setup is a mess. The goats pass through the door into the lower aviary, which is about 60 feet long, to get to the doors of their sheds, which extend another 30 feet from the upper end. The backside and roof is all plywood but the front of the aviary is flimsy 1/2" wire. The goat sheds have solid walls but their doors only extend about three-quarters of the opening to help with ventilation in the summer. Everything was built with the hope of keeping them safe from mountain lions, not bears. There are lots of big cats here who seem unafraid of humans so I've always feared them more than bears.

Edited to add - a bear visited a friend on the coast who has a solid-walled chicken house. The bear took the plywood wall down and ate the chickens! And that chicken house was built right.

YIkes!!!!!! OMG! Thankfully you an your partner are OKay!

Suzanne, I think you may be right about projecting fear. The incident where the boar charged my friend made me believe that they are highly sensitive to the energy we put out. My friend has a pathological fear of bears even though she'd never encountered one. We used to hike a lot and she obsessed about running into one. I always assured her that "our" bears were gentle herbivores and she had nothing to fear. The day of the mock charge, we were far out in the back country away from trails. Other humans don't go there. The higher we climbed, the more fresh piles we found so we were on alert. A lot of the hiking was up through deep, dark woods and that's where I thought we'd stumble on a napping bear. We finally broke into a steep meadow covered in wildflowers. We started the climb through the meadow when a boar stood up from where he'd been napping and looked down at us. She hadn't seen him so I whispered to her that there was a bear and that she shouldn't move. She was about 30 feet away from me but I could feel her fear and saw her stiffen. The bear started to casually saunter off stage right and I thought that was that, but then he stopped, sniffed the air and charged straight down at her. He paid no attention to me whatsoever, even though I was filming him with a camcorder. I yelled at her to remain absolutely still no matter what and she did! I was so proud of her. It took such courage for her to stand her ground when she was so terrified. I believe it saved her life because if she'd turned and ran, he would have killed her.

Hi Kathleen,

Wow, great stories.
I have to say that when I've been in bear country on vacation, I've always been afraid of encountering a bear. Yellowstone had signs up that read " beware of bears."
I hope you and your friends and family stay safe from all the dangerous animals that surround you.
Maybe you should think about writing a book about your nature adventures....you would have great photos to go along with your stories.

Regards,
Gay

.

It would be good if you would take action to protect the life of your visitor by taking action to eliminate your property as a source of food.
It is a very short step from the sort of bear visit you describe into the habituation of a dangerous nuisance bear. As the bear associates food with human presence, he grows more and more dependent on human-provided food sources, and will begin to destroy property and endanger people. For the sake of the bear and the people near you, try to figure out how to feed your animals without feeding the bear. For example, if you feed your animals in the morning, perhaps there will be less food available on average for random visits by bears.

Park rangers' aphorism: "A fed bear is a dead bear."

I'm well aware of that, Gregory. The bear was here the night before without killing anything or ripping anything open but he had knocked something over so we knew something big had been here. He returned mid-morning on a bright, sunny day at a time that there was food put out on top of the roof for outside cats.

All feed bags are, and have been, secured in a concrete building with solid doors, with the exception of what is put out at feeding time in the morning for outside cats and for the poultry and goat food given to them in the mornings. All dog food and biscuits are kept in the house. We never leave food out in the evening or at night, which is why we don't have problems with other nighttime raiders. Of course that doesn't include bird feed that they scatter on the ground or left-over alfalfa on the ground that the goats haven't eaten. All garbage is kept in a concrete building until it's taken to the dumps. My entire property is a food source by virtue of the fact that there are a lot of eatable animals living here. There are also lots of apples on the trees and on the ground for wildlife as well as a herd of resident deer. There is no way to make this property less attractive to bears without getting rid of all the animals, their feed, the fruit and the walnut trees, the wild deer and all the plants that wild deer feed on here, so what other action do you suggest we take to make us more responsible predator stewards?

Kathleen that sounds really scary, but in one way I'm very envious.

Over here in England our wildlife consists of foxes and an occasional badger, and that's as good as it gets. Oh, and if you are very, very lucky a wild deer in a remote part of the country, but I think I've only ever seen about three in my whole life! Bears are things that we would only ever see in a zoo. Seeing bears in the wild on a trip through the Canadian Rockies two years ago was a fantastic first experience for my wife and I, although I do appreciate the precautions that have to come into play.

Glad you and partner are safe after the encounter with your uninvited Thanksgiving guest.

"my telling him he was a very bad bear had no effect. "
No, I reckon it didn't but that made me chuckle a little.

David, I'll trade you a fox for a bear! There are lots of little red foxes here but they are skittish so I haven't gotten any pictures. I did get to watch a big gray fox chasing marmots above tree line near here and that was really cool but I was so far away I could only watch with binoculars.

Yeah, Louise, I didn't expect him to be intimidated by the disapproval in my voice but he wasn't the least bit afraid of me and that's not good. It's evident that this encounter with humans isn't his first rodeo. If he stays in the neighborhood, he will be shot by one of the local heroes. It's this damn drought that's driving bears down off the mountain.

Kathleen: Glad to hear that you are taking whatever means are practical in your situation. I know it is hard if not impossible to keep animals and NOT provide attractions to the bears. Good luck with your critters. A single raccoon can devastate a henhouse, so I can imagine what a bear might do in your situation.

re foxes: Foxes seem to be easiest to photograph in the spring, when they become oddly bold with their pups. I have only seen foxes long enough to photograph them when there was a litter of young present.

Wow,,what a story! I am glad your ok and everyone else is too. But that was a good read.. Felt like I was there!

Thanks, Gregory! I'll be looking for little foxes in the spring. I misspoke when I said I had no fox photos. I do have a couple of gray fox kits that I saw over on the Sonoma coast but took them so long ago, I forgot.


Thanks, Jon! Glad you enjoyed the story (and that it had a happy ending so far).

What a great story! I have had a few encounters with bears but had no issue whatsoever - I love bears and am happy that everything ended well for you and the bear

I'm not sure what kind of foxes we have in our area, they visit a friends barn which she is glad to offer. They have been staying there on and off for some years and I think the babies were born there. The mother was killed by a car a few years ago.

Thanks, Debbie!

I bet those foxes are helping with the mouse population in that barn, Suzanne, so they are returning the favor. I rarely see foxes on this property but I know they are here because I hear them talking in the woods at night and find their poop piles. They always poop on top of a rock! As far as I know, they are the only critter that consistently does that and sometimes the rock is barely as big as the pile. I wonder what's up with that.

Just before dawn this morning the peacocks were all honking like crazy. Their usual call is not an alert but when they honk it's always to warn of danger. I went out there but couldn't see anything so it was probably something moving in the woods behind their sheds. I got them calmed down and came back in but they started up again. There was also a scold of resident Stellar's jays screeching to each other across the canopy and those were alerts. I don't know if they were reacting to the peacocks or if they were warning the ground birds that something was afoot. Then when I logged on this morning there was an email from a friend who lives nearby warning me that a mountain lion came into her corral last night and killed a large doe. She would know the difference between cat sign and bear sign so now I'm wondering if it was a lion that got my birds going or if the bear is back. I'm leaving in a few days so there will only be one person here to keep everyone safe day and night. Makes me nervous.