It was early evening on a Friday, July 6, 2007 when the bears invaded.

My wife Linda and I were sitting at the dining room table watching the antics at the two sugar-water hummingbird feeders just outside our picture window. The little acrobats are a constant source of entertainment for us. They stay in the northern Virginia area from mid-April to mid-September. They sip about a half-gallon of nectar each day from the two red and yellow feeders. Hmmmmmmmm.

Our regular seed-eating feathered visitors were coming and going from the four-gallon feeder that hangs from a cable some fifteen feet from the window. The cable is stretched from my stone chimney to the top of a pole some twenty-five feet from the house. We’ve had a number of bears pull the feeder down over the years so a few days earlier I put an extension on the pole so it is now approximately fourteen feet high. From this lofty height the cable can sag and the bottom of the feeder is still seven feet and seven inches from the ground — surely high enough to be out of harm’s way from bears.

Cardinals, brown-headed cowbirds, American goldfinches, titmice and chickadees and a number of mourning doves performed their feeding rituals, while a mother phoebie flycatcher objected to their proximity to her nearby fledglings. She occasionally flogged the unfortunate bird she found feeding alone. The phoebie is a small bird, but when its young are perceived to be threatened, it is a little fury.

All this activity abruptly ceased as a bear approached from the woods behind the well-house and shed. That’s the direction they usually come from. This was a medium-large male, and he was interested in black-oil sunflower seeds. There was another bear approaching also. This was a smaller one that later proved to be a female. She appeared to have recently suckled as all four mammary glands (on her chest, BTW) were fully formed. I wondered where her cubs were. She was quite slender and had a curious foot-wide brown spot on her rump, which was due to the absence of black hair in that area. I readied my camera and began shooting a movie of the events on the ground.

The male bear stood to reach for the feeder. With both front paws he could reach about seven feet. Stretching with only one front paw he could catch air molecules within three inches of the bottom of the feeder. Stretch as he would, he could not reach the feeder. He did a lot of dancing around under it, then and on several other occasions, but it was unyielding in its maddening elusiveness.

The female decided that the key to having buckets-full of sunflower seeds available for munching lay with the pole. The pole was holding up the cable that held the feeder out of reach, so the pole should come down. She reared up on it with apparent intentions of pushing it over or shaking it until the goodies fell. (I’ve seen another bear on another day do this very same trick.) but before she could follow through, her frustrated partner danced over to her and pushed her away from the pole, his frustration turning to blundering amorous intentions. If he couldn’t get to the bird seed, they could at least have sex.

And have sex they did. They moved in a twenty foot circle, primarily because she could not “bear” his weight without staggering. She stumbled along with him going along for the ride. When I saw this operation I realized the cause of the bare spot on her rump. Rubbing his chest and belly across the top of her rump had worn the hair away. I also noticed smaller semi-bare spots on her flanks where his front paws gripped her. She bore the marks of his repeated love-making for all to see. When they were finished, both sat down for a well-earned rest. One almost expected to see a cigarette being shared.

Having failed after several attempts at the feeder, the pair headed for the front yard, where they explored blueberry and blackberry bushes and each other — again. (I was now observing, and filming, through the cut-glass of the front door, a not always undistorted view.) I recorded as they approached the front steps and came right on up on the  porch, exercising animal curiosity about flower pots and Linda’s sneakers and a small trash bag left next to the front door. At times, through my prismatic observation porthole, they appeared for all the world like two monstrous Black Labrador dogs sniffing about.

Linda called out from the living room, “Where are they now?”

“About three feet from me,” I said in a normal tone.

“Oh, my God!”

“Yeah,” I said.

At the sound of my voice they turned and scampered down the steps and lumbered up the driveway.

They abandoned the drive and circled the house, no doubt with visions of sunflower seeds still dancing in their heads. I went outside on the deck to follow their progress. They stopped at the edge of the yard and observed me observing them. That went on for a few minutes. I was surprised at their lack of fear of me and things human.

I talked to them for a bit, explaining that they were not supposed to be complacent where I was concerned. They seemed to regard me as a latter-day Cassandra and paid absolutely no attention to what I was saying, only to what I was doing — which was keeping a safe distance from them.

Perhaps it’s just the way bears are. I don’t know what it was, but something spooked the female and she bolted away through the woods, breaking small trees and branches as she went. He followed suit. I went back inside and returned to the living room. Damn if there wasn’t another bear in the yard.

This was a male, not quite as large as Lover-boy. I thought he was after the bird feeder also, but he was tracking the female of the mating pair just gone. He walked all about the yard with his nose to the ground, exactly where she (and Lover-boy) had been. He reared up on the pole, sniffing it thoroughly before tracking off toward the front yard, the way the pair had gone.

Linda called from another room to say she was going to check on the front yard.

“Well, don’t go outside just yet. There’s another bear waiting for you out there.”

“Another one?”

“Yup.”

“Oh, my God!”

I went to the front of the house and we watched through the windows as this latest bear explored and tracked off into the woods. We both returned to the living room.

After a few minutes Linda again went to check on the front yard. “There’s another bear out there in the blueberries,” she called. It is not clear to me if this is bear number four or bear number three returned from the woods.

By this time it was becoming a little dark. Well, damn! Here comes another bear from behind the well house. This is a different bear from all the others. I think I recognize her from about a month ago. She is just plain scrawny — emaciated, even decrepit. She is limping and has that tell-tale brown patch on her rump.* She had either been mating or scratching an awful itch on her backside. She seems to be tracking the other bears. She followed their scent toward the front of the house. I didn’t bother following her. I was busy changing memory cards in my camera. She was the last bear of the evening as far as I know. But who knows what happens when day fades to black. That is their domain, not mine.

I can’t help but wonder about the dynamics of bear social life played out here..Could this last bear be involved with the mating pair? Perhaps a previous amorous object of Lover-boy? Just curious about others of her species? Tracking bear number three, who was tracking bear number two, who is being romanced by bear number one? Or was she mixed up with bear number five, if there was a bear number five?

In many instances the social lives of some animals is quite indistinguishable from  that of the human species. Substitute man or woman for the word “bear” and you have the makings of one of those intricate soap operas. I understand if you’re having trouble keeping track of the bears in this soap opera, We had the same problem trying to keep them straight as we followed the action moving past various windows during that forty-five minutes or so. I was able to catch a lot of the dynamics on electronic media for later speculation and sorting out.

Anyway, paraphrasing Walter Cronkite, “that’s the way it was at our house on Friday evening of July 6^th of 2007.”  

Note on the collage: For comparison of physical appearance I included a picture in the upper right-hand corner from the article on DaddyBear (Breakfast Bear) that I did about six weeks ago.