Bears

I'm not taking about these bears (which I could use more of in my garden if I knew what brought them in), but instead I'm taking about these bears. I would say, and have said as I'm furiously knocking on wood, that I could have spent the summer dealing with a Noah's Ark full of pesky, garden-munching, soul-crushing critters that foiled my green-thumb attempts at every turn but I haven't really needed to. As it is, I've come to grips with the waves of deer and their fawns who had, up until last week, let the impatients planted around the house blossom and fill out to give it a quaint, cottage feel. Then those fuckers mowed them down entirely. But I'm not bitter, mostly. And that's about it. The big fence around the garden has done its job but I actually also believe I just don't have a critter problem. That fence wouldn't keep out woodchucks, rabbits, or porcupines but I haven't seen any evidence of them anyway. The chipmuncks and squirrels, while pervasive, simply eat the birdseed but they're cute and we do have birds so it's fine. But then there are bears.

We don't see the bears usually come through our place, but this year, like clock work, they've come meandering through and just made a mess of things. Early May had them up-end a trashcan we'd left outside. No harm, no foul...that was our error and so we moved the trashcan in and that was then. Then about six weeks ago, a weekly sweep of our property by the bears took down and smashed every fucking bird-feeder we had. So far, we've gone through 7 gold-finch feeders and 5 regular bird-feeders. In an act of defiance, we suspended a regular feeder way up in a tree with a rope so that only the birds could get to it...until the bear climbed up and swipped the rope with its paw and dropped the thing to get at the seed. All that is fine, sorta, but our last remaining feeder, bolted to the corner of the garden was hit hard sometime last night and left for ruin. And the thing is, I'm all about nature. I wouldn't even mind so much if they'd just do it while we were around so I could get it on film and post it on the blog. Is that too much to ask?