The chickens are fine. They are protected by hot wire baited with mackerel and peanut butter. What I didn't expect was to finish up tonight with the chickens, turned on the hot wire, and came inside my house to find a full size, 400 pound black bear in my living room raiding my meal worm colony.
There he was. There I was. Fifteen feet apart. My living room is tiny, so it was a very intimate encounter. I was very calm and quiet mainly because I didn't wish to be killed, and I also wished to minimize the damage a 400 pound bear could do to my house. I propped open the front screen door, and pointed to the exit. The bear, who was scarfing up meal worms and wheat bran substrate, casually declined. Instead he decided to go out the window he came in, knocking over the seven foot ficus, smashing my Christmas cactus, crushing my lamp, and leaving the screen crumpled up like a balled up piece of newspaper.
I had picked up the can of bear spray, and having held back dousing him while he was inside my house, I let him have it once he was off the porch. This time the wind was coming from behind me so I didn't get sprayed as has happened in the past. But he only got the red cloud of burning love from behind, having little effect. But I still had my shotgun. It's loaded with non-lethal rubber loads. He sauntered off down the grassy slope with me following close behind. I got off one shot, but these loads are not very hot, so it probably fell short of hitting him. He will be back. They always return to the scene of the crime.
It's been 95F, and the house is hot, but since I wish to be able to sleep sometime tonight, I closed all the windows except my bedroom slider. As I mentioned, it's been 26 years since the last time a bear burgled my house. The other time, I had just moved in and had left for ten minutes to gather rocks for a retaining wall I was building. When I returned, there was a bear in my living room. But that bear had demolished every room in the house in the ten minutes I was gone. There are still scratch marks on the bathtub and on my kitchen stove and the window sill over the kitchen sink. The microwave was smashed on the floor. Drawers were yanked out onto the floor, and broken house plants and spilled potting soil were strewn everywhere. It took six hours to clean up the mess, and the bear came back that evening for more.
This time the mess was isolated to the end of the living room where my worm farm was. Luckily, the bear was satisfied only with the worms and not the beetles. As it was, meal worms were crawling madly all over the living room, but they move slowly. If he had dumped out all the beetles, those suckers move fast and in no time would be running over every inch of my 900 square foot floor space. So I have that to be thankful for.
Good times.
There he was. There I was. Fifteen feet apart. My living room is tiny, so it was a very intimate encounter. I was very calm and quiet mainly because I didn't wish to be killed, and I also wished to minimize the damage a 400 pound bear could do to my house. I propped open the front screen door, and pointed to the exit. The bear, who was scarfing up meal worms and wheat bran substrate, casually declined. Instead he decided to go out the window he came in, knocking over the seven foot ficus, smashing my Christmas cactus, crushing my lamp, and leaving the screen crumpled up like a balled up piece of newspaper.
I had picked up the can of bear spray, and having held back dousing him while he was inside my house, I let him have it once he was off the porch. This time the wind was coming from behind me so I didn't get sprayed as has happened in the past. But he only got the red cloud of burning love from behind, having little effect. But I still had my shotgun. It's loaded with non-lethal rubber loads. He sauntered off down the grassy slope with me following close behind. I got off one shot, but these loads are not very hot, so it probably fell short of hitting him. He will be back. They always return to the scene of the crime.
It's been 95F, and the house is hot, but since I wish to be able to sleep sometime tonight, I closed all the windows except my bedroom slider. As I mentioned, it's been 26 years since the last time a bear burgled my house. The other time, I had just moved in and had left for ten minutes to gather rocks for a retaining wall I was building. When I returned, there was a bear in my living room. But that bear had demolished every room in the house in the ten minutes I was gone. There are still scratch marks on the bathtub and on my kitchen stove and the window sill over the kitchen sink. The microwave was smashed on the floor. Drawers were yanked out onto the floor, and broken house plants and spilled potting soil were strewn everywhere. It took six hours to clean up the mess, and the bear came back that evening for more.
This time the mess was isolated to the end of the living room where my worm farm was. Luckily, the bear was satisfied only with the worms and not the beetles. As it was, meal worms were crawling madly all over the living room, but they move slowly. If he had dumped out all the beetles, those suckers move fast and in no time would be running over every inch of my 900 square foot floor space. So I have that to be thankful for.
