Our First Bear Visitor !

Hey !

We had our first visit from a black bear!!!

I have known all along that bears are in the area, but until now I haven’t seen one.  We see lots of other animals (deer, porcupines, fox, coyotes, beavers (of course), turtles, chipmunks, squirrels) but until now no bears.

Looks open, but the bear just disappeared

We had settled down to our evening ritual, watching a DVD.  It was still light, being summer and all, and out of the corner of my eye I could see movement out the living room window.  Fully looking we could see a smallish black bear wandering down the driveway as if he owned the place. 

Now this was very cool – first time since we owned this place – so maybe 8 years or so….

Of course we immediately grabbed a cellphone for the camera and headed outside to get a shot.  Alas the noise of opening the door spooked the fellow and he made an abrupt left turn and headed into the bush and disappeared – so no pic of said bear.  I suspect this fellow was not used to humans – based on how fast he vacated the premises once he heard us.

We then turned and saw that he had quite trashed our garbage cans (pun intended).  Actually, the cans themselves were fine, but were now empty and lying on their sides.  The garbage and recycle was strewn down the driveway, away from the house.  We had not heard a thing!

Gathering up the stuff did not take long as we realized that mostly what had been left behind was from the can we use for the recycling (plastic containers, cans etc).  Not food waste.  The actual garbage, as opposed to the recycle, was gone.  We looked for a while but nothing – not venturing too far into the bush as we weren’t quite sure where the bear was at this point.  It was recovered the next day.

The garbage post bear

Back when we were first stocking the cottage we had purchased a specific type of garbage can for animal control.  It has two sets of lid holders – and as we have never had an issue, both sets were not engaged.  My bad.  Obviously, they are now both engaged – the bears now know where the local buffet is.  

It will be interesting to see if they come back.

Just in case - we dug out the bear spray