We were sitting lazily in the front room on Monday evening. The snow covered ground cast a bluish pallor to the landscape except where the grass has been exposed by deer feeding in the yard at night. Several of them dine here within view of the house and earshot of the TV as my wife watches her shows. She says they seem to be comforted by it somehow.
I looked out the west door window at the beautiful sunset of parallel purple and gold and pale blue sky and thought I should go outdoors to see it, but was just as content not to, having spent so much of my time outdoors, morning, noon and night, these past weeks of firearm deer season in Minnesota.
Hunting gets me outdoors as it does hundreds of other individuals across the north country. I am attune to what is going on around me when I’m standing, rather still, in an enclosed wooden box on ten-foot high stilt-like legs in the woods waiting to see a deer walk within within my shooting range of up to 150 yards. The other hunters can shoot even greater distances as their rifles are more powerful, but each model is applicable to the type of country they are hunting, me in the woods, they in the fields.
Jackie and I were playing cards one morning late last week as we try to do every morning, as I eat breakfast. It was about 9:00 AM. She had gone into the living room a minute, and returning to the dining room, looked across the creek to the woods.
"There's a deer running!" she said, causing me to look over there as well. What appeared to be a large doe ran the well-worn path there--then, with its knees buckling, suddenly fell to the ground in a heap, just like she tipped over dead.
This caused a great deal of excitement for us. Taking up our binoculars that are typically stationed as one pair in the kitchen and one pair on the living-room table, we studied the terrain for the cause. "Is there someone hunting over there?" she said, indignant that someone else should have shot that deer and it wasn't one of us.
"Did you hear a shot? I didn't," I said, watching the spot where the doe had fallen and thinking about how I could get over there to check it out now that the creek is thinly iced over.
"We wouldn't of heard the shooting, the way the house is all shut up, " Jackie said, looking through her binoculars. Then she said, slowly, "There's ... another ... deer standing ... near it ..."
I looked until my eyebrows started jumping with tension. "Where?" I asked her, looking for movement near where the doe went down.
"It's still there. Maybe it's a buck. Do you think they are in rut?" she said, with the binoculars still against her eyes."There! Did you see it move?"
I had, there was a flick of a white tail. The animal was standing east of the deer that had went down, its butt facing west.
"I do see it now," I said. "You've got a good eye."
Jackie put down her binocs and went into the kitchen for a moment.
"Hey, it looks like a small buck," I said. The deer had turned to look our way, its head lowered to peer beneath the sparse branches of a spruce.
Coming back into the living-room, she swept up her binoculars and agreed, "Yeah, that's the one I saw. You sure that's a buck?"
"Yeah, maybe the forkhorn we've been seeing," I said. "What happened to the doe that fell? Is this buck, her year old buck fawn or something?"
We watched as the little buck moved very slowly north as if in slow motion, and in that takeaway of our attention, the doe that had dropped was suddenly standing.
"Look, the doe is standing now, isn’t she?" I said, talking quietly as if I was outdoors, hunting.
The doe was indeed on her feet, her tail was down and close to her body, and she was looking over her shoulder at us, unmoving.
The little buck moved slowly back to where he had been and stood still, when suddenly a beautiful big-racked buck burst from the woods behind it and the doe shot from her cover like she was shot from a cannon. They both disappeared.
We see such things here and though it excites us, they’re almost common place. Still as common as deer are in Palmville and around Wannaska, a good hunting story can be a great hunting story any time of the year and told over and over again as years go by. For instance this one ... One of our hunters used a deer call app on his phone, and by waving an open bottle of doe scent on the wind, lured several deer to within shooting range of his deer stand, a phenomenal and successful idea.
Hunters have used calls by using their mouths or devices they have made or purchased, to call ducks, geese, coyotes, moose, and deer for centuries. One of my cousins simply pinched the sides of his nose and made a sound that called two bull moose back from the far edge of a field, and encouraged one of them to stop within sixty feet of us across a ditch grade. We weren’t moose hunting. Our nervous (read, scared) dog barked and gave away our cover or it might’ve just crossed the ditch and found us.
Other times animals don’t need to be called or lured or baited, just ignored to become pests, as do all our nesting geese with goslings become in the spring, Because they’re habituated to humans when they live in city parks all winter, they begin to think our vast yard is their parkland and want to leave their poop all over here too. It takes quite alot of due vigilance to teach them the harsh rules or we'd be knee deep in the muck. Then we have the bears now who prefer to visit our front door and nose around our house leaving their tracks and piles of poop about as their calling cards. I'm not sure which is worse.
Recently, a neighbor, commented to some customers in his shop that his brother, another nearby neighbor, had a sow bear and two cubs on his trail camera, and I, overhearing the conversation, said “Three? We’ve got five, I think. The sow and two cubs, and another sow and a single cub, not as big as the others. We found a denning site a couple weeks ago. Maybe we'll join in the spring bear hunt, next year.”
The neighbor said if he had animals on his stoop, big enough to kill him, he’d be shootin’ them.
So since then, my wife has become worried to go outdoors by herself, and complains frequently about bears dominating our trail camera footage, I wrote to a friend who works for the MNDNR:
“We've had bear in our videos since October 15. Three had rumbled slowly through along the big oaks here, just south of the house, back in early September. I think that was the first we had seen them this year. Last year, they were here just about that same time because I had just driven my 'new' 1998 Subaru home from Mpls and the bears had examined it from hood to tailgate, leaving muddy tracks of their fur, nose and tongue on it ... "Oooo, heated seats!" I featured one of the cubs on the cover of The Raven. We began calling the car, a Su-bear-u.
They revisited the car this year, leaving a telltale track of wet fur along the driver's side door and front fender. I smiled. The car probably shuddered.
The only food near the house, per se, is the propane grill. I grill 2-3x a week all year long. I may leave an empty steak wrapper near it to pick up later, but I can't recall but one or two mornings that there was any debris in the creekside yard, and those times we thought were by coons as we've had many of them almost all summer. Also, Jackie carries food scraps, from kitchen and meals, away from the house a hundred yards or so. Whether they're trailing her back, I don't know, but I don't think she'd receive that information well for some reason. She checks the trail cameras that are in the yard almost every night.
Speaking of trail cameras, I don't know that knowing what's going on in your yard at night is comforting or not. For the last 36 years I could count on both hands the number of cottontails I ever saw here, thinking jackrabbits were the dominant species--but now, on trail camera--we know there's a cottontail party here right outside our bedroom window every night with them running all over the place and acting goofy, I kid you not! They're chasing each other and jumping into the air. We had one camera positioned about a foot off the ground and they'd gather around it and take selfies.
Raccoons are just as bad. There was one family of five and one of three who came here, I think just for fun. We've been live-trapping them and letting them go in the DNR wildlife management area, just off the Wilson Road in Palmville, four miles west of here. One of the videos shows a trapped coon, in the cage, when the three bears stroll by not ten feet away on the way toward the back of our house and the creek. There was no interaction between them that we know of, but we imagined one said, "Look Ma, a boxed lunch!"
Joe called me yesterday to say that the neighbors who live 1.5 miles south of here, had discovered a bear den in the middle of their cornfield when they were harvesting. They said there was a ton of corn stocks down in the hole with the bears and that they could see a half dozen paws. They didn't say which field. I wonder if they were the same bears. Is the local bear population up this year?
Jackie asked me, "What besides people, kill bears? What eats them?"
And I said, "Nothin' that I know of, except bigger bears. They're at the top of the food chain around here, I think."
Well, that wasn't the right answer either...
I reckon they’re just fattening themselves up for hibernation and will soon disappear for the big sleep. And with all the habitat around here, especially the creek and river woods adjoining us to the east, it'll likely be around here. Lots of new blow downs after this summer's high winds.
The deer have returned to the yard the last couple nights, so maybe the bear have gone. But it's full moon tonight ... maybe one last stroll through the yard is in order.
You've thought through this well, Grasshopper. Before I answer, just a few more questions:
1) How frequent have the bear visits been to your house?
2) Were the bear visits all in one period of time (within a few days, a week, several weeks) or on-going throughout the summer/fall?
3) And lastly, why do you think the bears have been up by your house if it's not for food? You said you don't have any of that available to them.
Oh yeah, “Why do you think the bears have been up by your house if it's not for food?” is not the best response buddy, given the wife's trepidation. She'll be wracking her brain now wondering where/why the bears enjoy coming here so much. She’ll be turning the yard and surrounding environs into a gigantic bear study lab, writing down her observations, googling for answers, crying out in her sleep:
"What are they finding here to eat if there are no acorns? They sure are fat and roly-poly.”
” Are they eating all the food plots up that are meant for deer?”
“Is there going to be anything left for when the boys come up for deer season?”
I don't know if I've written about this before, but when I was maybe nine or ten years old--maybe even eleven--we visited my aunt and uncle from whom who I purchased this farm, on the tail end of a long arduous trip from Des Moines, Iowa. Now this would be circa 1960-1962. For me, these yearly trips 'uphome' to visit the relatives was much anticipated and this event only fueled the fire.
We had driven in darkness as there weren’t but very few yard lights at that time, since we dropped off the hill at Gully. It was all gravel roads after that. Northwest Minnesota was like the end of civilization as we know it. As we drove into the farm along the high winding, one-lane gravel road along Mikinaak Creek, all was dark except the yellowish beams of the headlights of our old Chevrolet sedan that swept across the creek basin, as we neared the house.
Driving into their yard, all the lights in their house were on, the dogs were barking wildly, and my Aunt Irene stood in the door with her hands on her hips, all excited about something happening by the barn. We learned that Uncle Martin was out behind the barn, with his rifle and flashlight, because a bear--yes, a bear!--had been among the sheep! A BEAR!! This was 1962! As a city kid raised on tales of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, why this was wildly exciting, amazing, unbelievable, and sealed my lifelong 'appreciation' for all the wild things up here as nothing else could do! Who'd thought that 56 years later there'd still be bears wandering around here at night--looking for long gone sheep?
I don't recall the outcome of that evening, but its memory (however distorted through the lens of age) has stayed with me. In the ensuing years of elementary school, my cousin who was born here and lived on this farm when he was a kid, let me take a bear skull to school for show and tell. Was that cool or what???
It is a good idea to make some noise so you don’t startle a bear (especially one with cubs), but you have a much better chance of being injured in your car (or getting cancer) then you do by a wolf, coyote, or bear. If the wolves or bears were looking at you as prey, they’d have eaten you by now! I carry a gun when I’m hunting, but I never worry about carrying one any other time I’m in the woods. I just make a little noise now and then.
Okay, I’ve taken your advice and started whistling and humming while walking, just to give the bears notice that I'm in the vicinity, but our trail camera that is pointed at our 'front' door suggests that the bears know me/us very well judging by their now frequent visits to our house. They have literally been on our stoop, on our sidewalk, climbing a full load of black dirt we had hauled in a week ago and having a ball.
We're not feeding birds, not recycling meat waste near the yard. Not leaving anything food-wise near the house except our propane grill, which we keep covered after use--which I have to say, they've not bothered 'cept once and I think they tipped it over by accident when they (or something) touched, placed nose or paw on, 'looked at', the end of the grill that the propane tank is on and it fell backwards toward them/it. They didn't trash it. Cover was still on.
We've had a big "Clam" tent up, near the house, since May, having taken it down just today. The bears never bothered it, never tripped over a tie down. No problems that way.
However much I am excited about having/seeing bears--my wife is not. She's worried about them becoming too habituated to our place, our scent, and with deer season just two weeks off--where it is they'll be hibernating when we're in the woods here.
She's even fallen out of love with our resident beavers and is encouraging me to trap some of them (too much work)(I'd ask someone to do it instead) because their waterline is now too close to the road (but the road is eight feet higher than the water). They are taking popples below the road--and a bunch across the creek she does not complain about.
To me, they're not hurting a thing. Even the neighbors don't mind the high water because they're not pasturing the creek bottom (or anywhere) anymore. No cattle. I'll ask the neighbors over by Joe’s to trap a few, just to satisfy the wife’s complaints.
But I reckon the bears do present a problem. About 4:30 tonight, I was north of our house about 200 yards straightening a tamarack that had blown over, I whistled a tune and talked to myself as I knelt in the grass turning in a ground anchor. I was in a swale with 30-foot spruce on one side and a popple woods on the other. I whistled louder, laughed at my own jokes, the whole bit. I didn't have a gun with me.
Then at about 5:00 PM, I was in my car just east of the schoolhouse west of our house, when I saw the three bears walking south on one of my firebreaks, maybe heading for the neighbor's harvested soybean field or the harvested cornfield south of us. I stopped the car and backed up and sounded the horn. They were about 250-300 yards away. The sow and one cub immediately took off east into the woods (the direction of our house), but the cinnamon colored one did not. It seemed unaware the other two had skedaddled.
I sounded the horn again and it stood up on its hind-legs. Again the horn, it remained standing. I backed up sounding the horn and it must have finally associated the car and the horn and ran east to follow the others.
I came back home about a half hour later, then took the rifle and walked north of the house, and shot into a tree a few times--just to make some noise. I'll shoot again before we go to bed.
We see that bear season ended on October 14. Like I say, I don't mind them. They bring an element of real wildness to the place that it doesn't have it all the time, just like if we heard gray wolves howling instead of coyotes. I mean, it's one reason I love our part of Minnesota. But, my wife is a concern for me as well, and other than what we're doing now, what more can be done?
Had bears again this morning about 1:45. I awoke to go to toilet. It was a full moon with a few clouds overhead. No bears. I went to backdoor to look at the scenery. No bears. Came back upstairs. Looked through kitchen window over sink. "Hmmmm, what's that now?" recognizing the dirt pile and wheelbarrow as common dark objects.
Taking up the binoculars to the left of the sink, I saw quite clearly the sow bear walk into the yard, about sixty yards from the house, and sit down with a big "Huummpphh", on her butt, as the kids scattered toward the house and propane grill area.
"Oh no, you don't!" I said to myself and leaped into action, whirling out of the kitchen.
Throwing on the outside light, I hurled myself down the steps to the entry door in my pajamas and stocking feet, and burst through the entry and out into the night, yelling,
"OH NO YOU DON'T!
WHAT'S THIS NOW?"
And began instinctively barking like a big dog, (not one of those little shrill yippy dogs), to further scare the holy gobsmack out of the poor terrified buggers now skidding, scrambling and falling over themselves with old mama sow bear leading the way out of the yard, through the brush and dried leaves and dead downed trees, making loud crashing splintering noises for miles, all the way to Badger.
When I got back to bed, exhausted, I simply said "Bears."
Jackie said, "I figured, with all that barking. Why didn't you just shoot?"
"G'night, dear." I said. "I'll tell you all about it in the morning."
Wow - you are quite the bear chaser! The bears are much more afraid of you than you are of them (obviously).And they are coming to your yard to feed on the acorns from the big oak trees you mentioned. They should be getting pretty fat and ready for hibernation by now. I'll doubt you'll see them again until maybe spring or next fall when the acorns are ready. We had a bear with a radio collar here that traveled ~40 miles (80 miles round trip) over a less than two week span to fill up with acorns from the oak trees west of Red Lake. Those acorns are great bear food! You're living in harmony!
They should be hibernating soon as the average hibernation date in MN is October 26 (today!).
Aye, but we had no acorns this year, that's the thing. None of our oaks bore fruit. I just figured it was because of the drought/dry weeks.
So it wasn't that. Let's hope we have seen the last of 'da bears', the wife is all bent out of shape worryin' about them being around for deer season when all her boys are up from the cities. I tried to assure her that once deer season starts, there'll be alot of hunters in the woods and likely bear'll want to hide away than sneak up on unsuspecting city hunters, but she isn't prone to believe just everything I say. So the proof is in the pudding. I'll keep you posted.
You are doing a good job in the challenges of living in harmony with the critters that live next to and around you. As you know, they can bring much more enjoyment than they do problems. It’s just a matter of learning to live with them and you’re finding good ways of doing that. I am almost (one can never say never) completely positive the bears will be asleep by next weekend. No worries! And when you've had a great meal somewhere, don't you always remember that place when you're hungry?
"Don't you always remember that place when you're hungry?" to Jackie, is like assuring folks that the serial killer they sent away for 25 years in another part of the country, will never be back. Not good, not good. Maybe I won't let her read this email...
Seriously, you have several choices:
Shoot the bear(s) if you are worried they are doing or might do damage to you or your property (perfectly legal as long as you call and notify a Conservation Officer within 48 hours. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/livingwith_wildlife/bears/relocating.html
Modify your space to discourage the bears (don’t put any more food plots close to your home – both deer and bears use them, remove the oak trees, and/or fence your garden and/or yard with electric fencing).
Share your space with them (as they don’t recognize private property) and learn to live with them (like by making loud noises to scare them away like you did as a barking dog!) because even if you shoot these, there will always be more in the future (case in point – your example from 1962);
Go somewhere where you think you will be safer until the bears hibernate.
The same advice above (except for the last choice) also applies to beavers, bobcat, squirrels, fox, mink, and several other critters people often consider a nuisance and don’t like around for various reasons. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/livingwith_wildlife/taking.html
Nah...
I looked out the west door window at the beautiful sunset of parallel purple and gold and pale blue sky and thought I should go outdoors to see it, but was just as content not to, having spent so much of my time outdoors, morning, noon and night, these past weeks of firearm deer season in Minnesota.
Hunting gets me outdoors as it does hundreds of other individuals across the north country. I am attune to what is going on around me when I’m standing, rather still, in an enclosed wooden box on ten-foot high stilt-like legs in the woods waiting to see a deer walk within within my shooting range of up to 150 yards. The other hunters can shoot even greater distances as their rifles are more powerful, but each model is applicable to the type of country they are hunting, me in the woods, they in the fields.
Jackie and I were playing cards one morning late last week as we try to do every morning, as I eat breakfast. It was about 9:00 AM. She had gone into the living room a minute, and returning to the dining room, looked across the creek to the woods.
"There's a deer running!" she said, causing me to look over there as well. What appeared to be a large doe ran the well-worn path there--then, with its knees buckling, suddenly fell to the ground in a heap, just like she tipped over dead.
This caused a great deal of excitement for us. Taking up our binoculars that are typically stationed as one pair in the kitchen and one pair on the living-room table, we studied the terrain for the cause. "Is there someone hunting over there?" she said, indignant that someone else should have shot that deer and it wasn't one of us.
"Did you hear a shot? I didn't," I said, watching the spot where the doe had fallen and thinking about how I could get over there to check it out now that the creek is thinly iced over.
"We wouldn't of heard the shooting, the way the house is all shut up, " Jackie said, looking through her binoculars. Then she said, slowly, "There's ... another ... deer standing ... near it ..."
I looked until my eyebrows started jumping with tension. "Where?" I asked her, looking for movement near where the doe went down.
"It's still there. Maybe it's a buck. Do you think they are in rut?" she said, with the binoculars still against her eyes."There! Did you see it move?"
I had, there was a flick of a white tail. The animal was standing east of the deer that had went down, its butt facing west.
"I do see it now," I said. "You've got a good eye."
Jackie put down her binocs and went into the kitchen for a moment.
"Hey, it looks like a small buck," I said. The deer had turned to look our way, its head lowered to peer beneath the sparse branches of a spruce.
Coming back into the living-room, she swept up her binoculars and agreed, "Yeah, that's the one I saw. You sure that's a buck?"
"Yeah, maybe the forkhorn we've been seeing," I said. "What happened to the doe that fell? Is this buck, her year old buck fawn or something?"
We watched as the little buck moved very slowly north as if in slow motion, and in that takeaway of our attention, the doe that had dropped was suddenly standing.
"Look, the doe is standing now, isn’t she?" I said, talking quietly as if I was outdoors, hunting.
The doe was indeed on her feet, her tail was down and close to her body, and she was looking over her shoulder at us, unmoving.
The little buck moved slowly back to where he had been and stood still, when suddenly a beautiful big-racked buck burst from the woods behind it and the doe shot from her cover like she was shot from a cannon. They both disappeared.
We see such things here and though it excites us, they’re almost common place. Still as common as deer are in Palmville and around Wannaska, a good hunting story can be a great hunting story any time of the year and told over and over again as years go by. For instance this one ... One of our hunters used a deer call app on his phone, and by waving an open bottle of doe scent on the wind, lured several deer to within shooting range of his deer stand, a phenomenal and successful idea.
Hunters have used calls by using their mouths or devices they have made or purchased, to call ducks, geese, coyotes, moose, and deer for centuries. One of my cousins simply pinched the sides of his nose and made a sound that called two bull moose back from the far edge of a field, and encouraged one of them to stop within sixty feet of us across a ditch grade. We weren’t moose hunting. Our nervous (read, scared) dog barked and gave away our cover or it might’ve just crossed the ditch and found us.
Other times animals don’t need to be called or lured or baited, just ignored to become pests, as do all our nesting geese with goslings become in the spring, Because they’re habituated to humans when they live in city parks all winter, they begin to think our vast yard is their parkland and want to leave their poop all over here too. It takes quite alot of due vigilance to teach them the harsh rules or we'd be knee deep in the muck. Then we have the bears now who prefer to visit our front door and nose around our house leaving their tracks and piles of poop about as their calling cards. I'm not sure which is worse.
Recently, a neighbor, commented to some customers in his shop that his brother, another nearby neighbor, had a sow bear and two cubs on his trail camera, and I, overhearing the conversation, said “Three? We’ve got five, I think. The sow and two cubs, and another sow and a single cub, not as big as the others. We found a denning site a couple weeks ago. Maybe we'll join in the spring bear hunt, next year.”
The neighbor said if he had animals on his stoop, big enough to kill him, he’d be shootin’ them.
So since then, my wife has become worried to go outdoors by herself, and complains frequently about bears dominating our trail camera footage, I wrote to a friend who works for the MNDNR:
“We've had bear in our videos since October 15. Three had rumbled slowly through along the big oaks here, just south of the house, back in early September. I think that was the first we had seen them this year. Last year, they were here just about that same time because I had just driven my 'new' 1998 Subaru home from Mpls and the bears had examined it from hood to tailgate, leaving muddy tracks of their fur, nose and tongue on it ... "Oooo, heated seats!" I featured one of the cubs on the cover of The Raven. We began calling the car, a Su-bear-u.
They revisited the car this year, leaving a telltale track of wet fur along the driver's side door and front fender. I smiled. The car probably shuddered.
The only food near the house, per se, is the propane grill. I grill 2-3x a week all year long. I may leave an empty steak wrapper near it to pick up later, but I can't recall but one or two mornings that there was any debris in the creekside yard, and those times we thought were by coons as we've had many of them almost all summer. Also, Jackie carries food scraps, from kitchen and meals, away from the house a hundred yards or so. Whether they're trailing her back, I don't know, but I don't think she'd receive that information well for some reason. She checks the trail cameras that are in the yard almost every night.
Speaking of trail cameras, I don't know that knowing what's going on in your yard at night is comforting or not. For the last 36 years I could count on both hands the number of cottontails I ever saw here, thinking jackrabbits were the dominant species--but now, on trail camera--we know there's a cottontail party here right outside our bedroom window every night with them running all over the place and acting goofy, I kid you not! They're chasing each other and jumping into the air. We had one camera positioned about a foot off the ground and they'd gather around it and take selfies.
Raccoons are just as bad. There was one family of five and one of three who came here, I think just for fun. We've been live-trapping them and letting them go in the DNR wildlife management area, just off the Wilson Road in Palmville, four miles west of here. One of the videos shows a trapped coon, in the cage, when the three bears stroll by not ten feet away on the way toward the back of our house and the creek. There was no interaction between them that we know of, but we imagined one said, "Look Ma, a boxed lunch!"
Joe called me yesterday to say that the neighbors who live 1.5 miles south of here, had discovered a bear den in the middle of their cornfield when they were harvesting. They said there was a ton of corn stocks down in the hole with the bears and that they could see a half dozen paws. They didn't say which field. I wonder if they were the same bears. Is the local bear population up this year?
Jackie asked me, "What besides people, kill bears? What eats them?"
And I said, "Nothin' that I know of, except bigger bears. They're at the top of the food chain around here, I think."
Well, that wasn't the right answer either...
I reckon they’re just fattening themselves up for hibernation and will soon disappear for the big sleep. And with all the habitat around here, especially the creek and river woods adjoining us to the east, it'll likely be around here. Lots of new blow downs after this summer's high winds.
The deer have returned to the yard the last couple nights, so maybe the bear have gone. But it's full moon tonight ... maybe one last stroll through the yard is in order.
You've thought through this well, Grasshopper. Before I answer, just a few more questions:
1) How frequent have the bear visits been to your house?
2) Were the bear visits all in one period of time (within a few days, a week, several weeks) or on-going throughout the summer/fall?
3) And lastly, why do you think the bears have been up by your house if it's not for food? You said you don't have any of that available to them.
Oh yeah, “Why do you think the bears have been up by your house if it's not for food?” is not the best response buddy, given the wife's trepidation. She'll be wracking her brain now wondering where/why the bears enjoy coming here so much. She’ll be turning the yard and surrounding environs into a gigantic bear study lab, writing down her observations, googling for answers, crying out in her sleep:
"What are they finding here to eat if there are no acorns? They sure are fat and roly-poly.”
” Are they eating all the food plots up that are meant for deer?”
“Is there going to be anything left for when the boys come up for deer season?”
I don't know if I've written about this before, but when I was maybe nine or ten years old--maybe even eleven--we visited my aunt and uncle from whom who I purchased this farm, on the tail end of a long arduous trip from Des Moines, Iowa. Now this would be circa 1960-1962. For me, these yearly trips 'uphome' to visit the relatives was much anticipated and this event only fueled the fire.
We had driven in darkness as there weren’t but very few yard lights at that time, since we dropped off the hill at Gully. It was all gravel roads after that. Northwest Minnesota was like the end of civilization as we know it. As we drove into the farm along the high winding, one-lane gravel road along Mikinaak Creek, all was dark except the yellowish beams of the headlights of our old Chevrolet sedan that swept across the creek basin, as we neared the house.
Driving into their yard, all the lights in their house were on, the dogs were barking wildly, and my Aunt Irene stood in the door with her hands on her hips, all excited about something happening by the barn. We learned that Uncle Martin was out behind the barn, with his rifle and flashlight, because a bear--yes, a bear!--had been among the sheep! A BEAR!! This was 1962! As a city kid raised on tales of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, why this was wildly exciting, amazing, unbelievable, and sealed my lifelong 'appreciation' for all the wild things up here as nothing else could do! Who'd thought that 56 years later there'd still be bears wandering around here at night--looking for long gone sheep?
I don't recall the outcome of that evening, but its memory (however distorted through the lens of age) has stayed with me. In the ensuing years of elementary school, my cousin who was born here and lived on this farm when he was a kid, let me take a bear skull to school for show and tell. Was that cool or what???
It is a good idea to make some noise so you don’t startle a bear (especially one with cubs), but you have a much better chance of being injured in your car (or getting cancer) then you do by a wolf, coyote, or bear. If the wolves or bears were looking at you as prey, they’d have eaten you by now! I carry a gun when I’m hunting, but I never worry about carrying one any other time I’m in the woods. I just make a little noise now and then.
Okay, I’ve taken your advice and started whistling and humming while walking, just to give the bears notice that I'm in the vicinity, but our trail camera that is pointed at our 'front' door suggests that the bears know me/us very well judging by their now frequent visits to our house. They have literally been on our stoop, on our sidewalk, climbing a full load of black dirt we had hauled in a week ago and having a ball.
We're not feeding birds, not recycling meat waste near the yard. Not leaving anything food-wise near the house except our propane grill, which we keep covered after use--which I have to say, they've not bothered 'cept once and I think they tipped it over by accident when they (or something) touched, placed nose or paw on, 'looked at', the end of the grill that the propane tank is on and it fell backwards toward them/it. They didn't trash it. Cover was still on.
We've had a big "Clam" tent up, near the house, since May, having taken it down just today. The bears never bothered it, never tripped over a tie down. No problems that way.
However much I am excited about having/seeing bears--my wife is not. She's worried about them becoming too habituated to our place, our scent, and with deer season just two weeks off--where it is they'll be hibernating when we're in the woods here.
She's even fallen out of love with our resident beavers and is encouraging me to trap some of them (too much work)(I'd ask someone to do it instead) because their waterline is now too close to the road (but the road is eight feet higher than the water). They are taking popples below the road--and a bunch across the creek she does not complain about.
To me, they're not hurting a thing. Even the neighbors don't mind the high water because they're not pasturing the creek bottom (or anywhere) anymore. No cattle. I'll ask the neighbors over by Joe’s to trap a few, just to satisfy the wife’s complaints.
But I reckon the bears do present a problem. About 4:30 tonight, I was north of our house about 200 yards straightening a tamarack that had blown over, I whistled a tune and talked to myself as I knelt in the grass turning in a ground anchor. I was in a swale with 30-foot spruce on one side and a popple woods on the other. I whistled louder, laughed at my own jokes, the whole bit. I didn't have a gun with me.
Then at about 5:00 PM, I was in my car just east of the schoolhouse west of our house, when I saw the three bears walking south on one of my firebreaks, maybe heading for the neighbor's harvested soybean field or the harvested cornfield south of us. I stopped the car and backed up and sounded the horn. They were about 250-300 yards away. The sow and one cub immediately took off east into the woods (the direction of our house), but the cinnamon colored one did not. It seemed unaware the other two had skedaddled.
I sounded the horn again and it stood up on its hind-legs. Again the horn, it remained standing. I backed up sounding the horn and it must have finally associated the car and the horn and ran east to follow the others.
I came back home about a half hour later, then took the rifle and walked north of the house, and shot into a tree a few times--just to make some noise. I'll shoot again before we go to bed.
We see that bear season ended on October 14. Like I say, I don't mind them. They bring an element of real wildness to the place that it doesn't have it all the time, just like if we heard gray wolves howling instead of coyotes. I mean, it's one reason I love our part of Minnesota. But, my wife is a concern for me as well, and other than what we're doing now, what more can be done?
Had bears again this morning about 1:45. I awoke to go to toilet. It was a full moon with a few clouds overhead. No bears. I went to backdoor to look at the scenery. No bears. Came back upstairs. Looked through kitchen window over sink. "Hmmmm, what's that now?" recognizing the dirt pile and wheelbarrow as common dark objects.
Taking up the binoculars to the left of the sink, I saw quite clearly the sow bear walk into the yard, about sixty yards from the house, and sit down with a big "Huummpphh", on her butt, as the kids scattered toward the house and propane grill area.
"Oh no, you don't!" I said to myself and leaped into action, whirling out of the kitchen.
Throwing on the outside light, I hurled myself down the steps to the entry door in my pajamas and stocking feet, and burst through the entry and out into the night, yelling,
"OH NO YOU DON'T!
WHAT'S THIS NOW?"
And began instinctively barking like a big dog, (not one of those little shrill yippy dogs), to further scare the holy gobsmack out of the poor terrified buggers now skidding, scrambling and falling over themselves with old mama sow bear leading the way out of the yard, through the brush and dried leaves and dead downed trees, making loud crashing splintering noises for miles, all the way to Badger.
When I got back to bed, exhausted, I simply said "Bears."
Jackie said, "I figured, with all that barking. Why didn't you just shoot?"
"G'night, dear." I said. "I'll tell you all about it in the morning."
Wow - you are quite the bear chaser! The bears are much more afraid of you than you are of them (obviously).And they are coming to your yard to feed on the acorns from the big oak trees you mentioned. They should be getting pretty fat and ready for hibernation by now. I'll doubt you'll see them again until maybe spring or next fall when the acorns are ready. We had a bear with a radio collar here that traveled ~40 miles (80 miles round trip) over a less than two week span to fill up with acorns from the oak trees west of Red Lake. Those acorns are great bear food! You're living in harmony!
They should be hibernating soon as the average hibernation date in MN is October 26 (today!).
Aye, but we had no acorns this year, that's the thing. None of our oaks bore fruit. I just figured it was because of the drought/dry weeks.
So it wasn't that. Let's hope we have seen the last of 'da bears', the wife is all bent out of shape worryin' about them being around for deer season when all her boys are up from the cities. I tried to assure her that once deer season starts, there'll be alot of hunters in the woods and likely bear'll want to hide away than sneak up on unsuspecting city hunters, but she isn't prone to believe just everything I say. So the proof is in the pudding. I'll keep you posted.
You are doing a good job in the challenges of living in harmony with the critters that live next to and around you. As you know, they can bring much more enjoyment than they do problems. It’s just a matter of learning to live with them and you’re finding good ways of doing that. I am almost (one can never say never) completely positive the bears will be asleep by next weekend. No worries! And when you've had a great meal somewhere, don't you always remember that place when you're hungry?
"Don't you always remember that place when you're hungry?" to Jackie, is like assuring folks that the serial killer they sent away for 25 years in another part of the country, will never be back. Not good, not good. Maybe I won't let her read this email...
Seriously, you have several choices:
Shoot the bear(s) if you are worried they are doing or might do damage to you or your property (perfectly legal as long as you call and notify a Conservation Officer within 48 hours. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/livingwith_wildlife/bears/relocating.html
Modify your space to discourage the bears (don’t put any more food plots close to your home – both deer and bears use them, remove the oak trees, and/or fence your garden and/or yard with electric fencing).
Share your space with them (as they don’t recognize private property) and learn to live with them (like by making loud noises to scare them away like you did as a barking dog!) because even if you shoot these, there will always be more in the future (case in point – your example from 1962);
Go somewhere where you think you will be safer until the bears hibernate.
The same advice above (except for the last choice) also applies to beavers, bobcat, squirrels, fox, mink, and several other critters people often consider a nuisance and don’t like around for various reasons. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/livingwith_wildlife/taking.html
Nah...
Please place a trail camera inside your house pointed at your favorite wildlife viewing window (with audio) so that we can all enjoy your adventures with Jackie in realtime or as a podcast. I'll set up a link from the Wannaskan Almanac Web site once you set it up.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, you are truly Wannaska's Marlin Perkins. Maybe Queen Bonnie or Riverside Station would sponsor your livecast/podcast.
There is no current listing in the DMS-5 for a phobia of bears. Ursusamericanuphobia seems right. Here are some tips from a person who share's Jackie's condition: https://paddling.com/learn/battling-bear-phobia/
Since you've established such a fine working relationship with Minnesota DNR Wildlife, perhaps you could suggest that the DNR post your discourse with their agent on the DNR Web site: https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/living_with_spouse_who_is_afraid_of_wildlife/i'mjustsaying.html
Love those bears and other critters. We are graced with their presence, and privileged when they permit us to see them. I'm sure I must have told you about the extremely large (800 pounds, I estimate) that loped across the road as nonchalantly as a confident debutante. I've seen enough bears to know this one was different. If it was a black bear, it was by far the biggest I'd seen, and of a color I had not seen. I'm no expert, and my DNR friend was skeptical when I asked if this bear just might be a grizzly. The DNR expert said nah, too far out of its range (not so far from our western border), and that it most likely was a very large, black bear with a brown coat. I persisted in relaying my observations that came from the 20 seconds the bear was clearly in view. It had a blonde cape across its shoulders, shorter ears and tail than the black bears I've seen, and all around a magnificent presence absent from our local ursus americanus. This, to my sight and observation was ursus arctos paying us a most unlikely visit Unlike Jackie and others who are intimidated by such an awesome being, I am awed by such a presence, wish more would visit us, and cherish the sightings as unusual as this one. Just because a human fears another animal, doesn't mean we should harass or kill it. Where that puts our deer population, I'm not qualified to say.
ReplyDeleteJP Savage
We have a fair number of critters visiting us here a mile downstream from you, but nothing like your numbers and variety. I was talking to Icklic about this and he has a theory that an animal will return to the place it was born. Your wide view of the creek has a downside. All those newborns are imprinting on your house. It's intergenerational. Well Icklic has a solution. I'll let him take over:
ReplyDeleteYa, Steve, I got a nanser for your problem dere. I took a little road-trip out to da Massashoots-its Insty-toot of Teknology for some help. Dey give me da run around at first, but ven I started trimin' my nails vit da big knife Uncle Torbjorn brought back from Sveden, dey showed some respect and sent me up to da department of animal fizzyology. Da guy dere vas very interested and told me to go get some coffee and he vud rig something up, ya! Vat he done vas unbelievable, Steve! He made up a film t'ing dat proyects a picture onto da house dat makes da house invisabull to da animal brain. "Hus-camo," he called it. Only problem is da proyector cost tventy t'ousand dollars! Uff da! Vell ve sat around drinking coffee and some other stuff I had in my coat and after avile, I said, Mogenns (he vas a Nicelander, don't yew no) vy don't vee use one of dem Christmas light proyectors? I yust saw dem on sale at Shopko back home." Mogenns said, "Ya you bet! Give me some time to make a few changes here." Vell it took him a veek! I made a dugout in da bank of da Charles River dere for da night time. I tell yew I'm glad to be back here in nice qviet Palmville, yew bet! Vell Steve, get out your ekstenshun cords, Your troubles is over. I'm sorry but yew'l have to put up da clam tent again. Dat east-coast proyector is not vaterpruf. Vat a vimp!