A Black Bear Woke Us Up

At my house, we have a bear. I kind of feared that because that means I can't feed the birds unless I remember to bring in the feeders every night. That's not gonna happen. I have no seed in my feeders, but we saw him/her last night. My husband and I were sleeping and I heard a noise, so did he. He started to get up, I grabbed him and said "Where are you going?" Duh. He said to check out the noise. I love my man. I did not want to check out the noise. The noise turned out to be a beautiful bear eating garbage in our yard. He must have "stashed" a bag from our Wednesday morning trash day and saved it for later. The previous time he got into our trash he ate old bagels, two boxes of fruit bars and licked clean the Nutella container. Last night it was old bagels again (maybe we should stop buying bagels...?), Ricotta cheese and chili powder. Strange taste. We now have to figure out what to do. We can't not put the trash out, but he won't stay out of ours or our neighbors' trash cans. We don't want to encourage him, he needs to be wild and stay that way. We aren't quite sure what we will do, possibly invest in a bear-proof trash can, if there really is such a thing. Or put ammonia-soaked rags in the trash cans when we put them out on trash day, I've read that might work. Either way, even though cleaning up trash is a pain, I still feel lucky to share our landscape with the Black Bear.

The Black Bear is the second largest land mammal in New York (moose are bigger). They range in size from 300 pounds (males) to about 170 pounds (females). They eat berries, other fruit, grasses, nuts, seeds, insects and grubs and dead animals, as well as "human" food like corn, honey, bird seed and, of course, trash.

They are awake and looking for food. If you are lucky enough to live in a rural area, you just might see one, you have to get out of bed to do it though.