It must have been fall 2008 when our garbage cans started jumping over the waist-high wooden fence that forms our trash can box. They would make a beeline for the woods, leaving a trail of empty soup cans and milk bottles in their wake. I was always able to follow the trail of trash into the woods and retrieve them.

Then there was the morning in the summer 2009 when I awoke before dawn and discovered a rather large bear in the act of pulling a can out of the box with its mouth. It bolted when I opened the back door and yelled. I still have the trash can lid with the teeth holes in it. We also discovered a bear in the fall of that year fattening itself on acorns in the back yard. It’s impossible to say if this was the same bear that had been stealing our garbage cans but during hunting season 2010 several of the locals reported shooting at bears in the area. All the reports I heard said the bears managed to run into the thickets and could not be tracked or retrieved. We’ve had no runaway garbage cans since then so I can safely assume the culprit has moved on to safer territory or met its demise.

There’s also a problem with bears destroying vegetable gardens in my neck o’ the woods. Mike has had this problem for years and has even photographed bears in his garden at night with one of those laser beam activated night vision cameras. As a matter of fact, a bear knocked down the camera and broke it. Fortunately, I haven’t heard of any attacks on livestock but I have heard of pet dogs being attacked. According to “Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance” by Stephen Herrero there were 23 people killed by black bears between 1900 and 1980 which, believe it or not, is more attacks than were credited to brown bears during the same period.

Bears aren’t excessively hungry right now, but they do have an instinctive desire to gain weight during the fall and early winter in anticipation of hibernation. Therefore, we probably need to give extra attention to protecting our garbage cans from attack. If you have any dried corn left in the cornfield a bear would gladly volunteer to help you strip the ears. Like I previously mentioned acorns and other nuts, like hickory and walnuts, are also a great source of fattening calories and the bears know it. I’ve also had a pile of firewood knocked down and scattered about by a bear looking for all those wormy crawly treats that reside underneath.

Other sources of these delicacies include a myriad of stuff like a plastic kiddie pool left on the lawn, garden borders and stepping stones—anything that forms a barrier between the ground and the sun. My dog sleeps in one of those plastic igloo dog houses. It’s not anchored down. I hope Rascal has enough courage to chase the bear away from her little piece of the pie before he flips it over.