We’re not doing it weekly anymore, but the Estate Finds will still creep in here and there, and this one certainly merits attention; we’re doing away with the roman numeral horseshit though. This is what greeted me when I went out front today:
That’s part of our bird feeder system. Two feeders down, both damaged, one crook tilted crazily. Now, the soil tends to give way over time and rain and cause things like this to start leaning on their own, but typically not this far.
This was the feeder on the crook, obviously having seen better days.
This was the other one, with the supporting wire pulled completely out of the top. I might have chalked this up to the blue feeder and crook toppling over and hitting this one, except they couldn’t reach the level of this. Plus the shattered feeder wasn’t all that close to this one or its crook. And then we have the suet feeders.
This one had been quite close to the house, right in front of The Girlfriend’s art room window, hanging from a crook that was also leaning way over, now better than five meters away from it. That’s not the work of squirrels, much less the wind (which wasn’t very strong recently anyway.) But worse was the second one.
This was twice the distance away, and forced open enough to bend the sides and rip apart the hinges. It would take me some force to bend the side like that.
In other words, we likely had a bear visit last night, right in front of the house. Now, a few months back I spoke with someone who had to take his hummingbird feeders inside each evening because the black bears would raid them, right under his roof overhang, and he was only a few kilometers off. But at the same time, we’re in a residential development, even with the ponds right there, and surrounded by either fairly busy roads (you’ve heard the traffic in the background of the videos) or a deep creek that bears are unlikely to cross. So, not impossible, but there are plenty of reasons for them to avoid the area. and this is the first evidence that we’ve seen of them.
Well, not exactly. When we moved in, I noticed some damage to the end of a drainage pipe that overhung a retaining wall of the back of the house:
Typical heavy-duty plastic (HDPE, probably) pipe, and the retaining wall is half a meter high. The previous owners only had a lap dog that couldn’t even reach this, and even if it could, it probably couldn’t have produced holes this size:
I’d asked the owner about this, and he didn’t even know it was there. At the time, I’d suspected it had been from a coyote or at least a large wandering dog, but now I’ve revised that suspicion (and firmed it up a bit.)
No, we don’t have any surveillance cameras of any kind outside, and yes, that’s going to change soon; I’d intended for at least one to monitor the pond and backyard anyway, though it would’ve been unable to capture this going on. I guess I’ll have to add at least one for the front too.
But you go outside at night all the time, you say, Are you going to break that habit now? And the answer is, no, but I might take more time paying attention to the faint sounds I hear (and I’ve heard the occasional inexplicable rustle from the edge of the bamboo forest.) Here, it’s only going to be an American black bear (Ursus americanus,) a species that tends to be pretty shy and not at all aggressive – unless there are cubs at hand. Plus, the one time I suspect I was close (relatively – within a hundred meters) to a black bear, the musk smell was noticeable, and I’ve never detected that here. Still, we’ll see what happens, right? And if the posts stop, check the news for eastern North Carolina…