There's a bear in the woods

As one of Brandon's birthday gifts from his parents, they gifted him a state of the art deer feeder - which he was elated to receive.  For those of you that have necks not of the color red - that means its a contraption you put outside with deer food pellets & corn in it to attract deer to a particular area.  There's even a handy timer on it that shoots out deer food at certain times of the day!  B doesn't even hunt on our property, he just likes knowing that deer are lurking about.

So after he spent a solid afternoon getting things set up (which included carving out some weeds, installing said seeder, and positioning it 'just so'), he had his feeder up and ready to attract some "deersch" (as booboo says).

After about a week or two, on one of our walks down to the pear trees, we discovered that someone (or something, oooh - spooky!) had given deer feeder a strong enough whack to the ground to bust off a leg. And the mystery culprit was smooth enough to open the latched lid to expose the bounty of deer pellets/corn mixture.

In my inexperienced mind, I believed it to be the wind and I snapped a pic of it and texted it to B.  His text reply included something that registered in my mind as "bear. get out now," which then led me to scan the surrounding area with extreme paranoia before scooping Grey up and hauling my pregnant belly up closer to the house.  

B tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the deer feeder up for a few more nights, but each morning we saw that it had been re-tipped and opened.  He finally resolved to keep it down as he was feeding Yogi the Bear every night instead of the intended Bambi-like animals of the forest. 

Each time Bully was outside during the night or day and go off into a barking frenzy we knew it could be a variety of things; like a stray black cat, that I thought was an escaped Jinxy for a large portion of the day, that was stuck in one of our pine trees.  Or it could be the UPS man driving up the driveway, or even the neighbors pulling into their house since we have a clear view of them with the foilage gone.  But we'd always first think it was the bear sneaking around the place, although none of us have made an actual sighting (except for one of our neighbors who said, "that's the biggest black bear I've ever seen...granted I've never seen one before him").

Then just a few weeks later, we had another bear-related incident.  Around 8p, we lost all power in our house and totally exhausted anyway, I announced that was a sign from above that I better retire my big belly to bed.  Bud had to give Bullet a few good shocks on his shock collar to get him to quit barking down at the bend in the driveway and to get in the house.  Since we were out both football games and heat for the night, we made a call to the neighbors (who said their power had gone out but since come back on) and then to the electric company to let them know that B and Grey were missing football replays we were freezing.

Fairly quickly, the electricians arrived and knocked on the door to explain that a bear had been shaking the electric pole at the bend in our driveway so hard that it had knocked loose some cables which was the reason we were still out of power.  It took them until after 11p to fix both the pole issues and replace our big electric box in our yard which apparently was also effected.  All of this information didn't reach my brain until the morning when like a bear myself, rolled out of a 12 hour unconscious slumber.

Bear 2, Studers 0.  Pretty sure this will be the only time I'm forcing Bud to add another hunting license to his collection.

What does this mean for me, besides the fact that I have seriously considered a plan of attack should a bear appear and I'd need to defend/save/protect Greyson...and that on more than one occasion I have had a nightmare in which I couldn't defend/save/protect Greyson from the bear...Well, it also means that I certainly cannot do these pins until the bear situation is regulated.  (Which kind of feels even more sad than not feeling entirely safe during my nighttime walks to the compost bin.)

a) bird feeder a la toilet paper roll, peanut butter, and birdseed:

Source: moffattgirls.blogspot.com via Tabitha on Pinterest

b) bird feeder wreath:

Source: bystephanielynn.com via Tabitha on Pinterest

Crossing my fingers that we have the bear under control by Christmas time, since I'm hoping to repeat something that my Aunt did with us when I was a little girl.  I'll be posting about it (if Yogi Bear has left us) but  for anticipation reasons, just know it has to do with an outdoor Christmas tree that is friendly for the deer, birds, and other critters (and probably Bully Boy).