Guess Who Came To Breakfast

The noise that awakened me at dawn on Memorial Day, May 28, 2007 was obviously made by something large and powerful. Actually I knew what it was at the moment my eyes flew open. I have on previous occasions been treated to similar sounds. My four-gallon bird feeder had hit the ground with a mighty thump — at the hands (paws) of one of my black furry neighbors.

I grabbed my camera from its pocket on the belt of my chair-draped jeans and headed for the dining room picture window. A commanding view of the bird feeder, some fifteen feet away, is available from there. The feeder hangs from a cable stretched from my chimney to the top of a twelve-foot pole positioned some twenty-five feet from the house. There it normally is, suspended out of reach of pesky squirrels that make a daily clown show of attempting to thwart the baffle between it and the pole. (I like the squirrels, I just don’t want them on the feeder, for they tend to enlarge the feeder holes to infinity.)

Except that, as I wholly suspected, it was not hanging any more. It was lying on the ground with one whopper of a black bear in the middle of its various assemblages. He was calmly licking up spilled black oil sunflower seeds.

 I carefully suppressed the flash on my camera and set it to movie mode. For the next sixteen minutes, until the two gigabyte SD memory card in the camera filled up, I filmed DaddyBear, as I began calling him, ingesting sunflower seeds. At first it was quite dark, but gradually the light became better and we (Linda had joined me in the audience) could appreciate just what a handsome fellow this was that had come to breakfast at our house.

He was very plump for it being spring of the year. His coat was glossy black with the exception of his brown muzzle. His head was the size of a half-bushel basket, and his neck and shoulders reminded one not so much of a black bear as much as those of a brown grizzly. He even had a shoulder hump. Quite an amazing specimen! I conservatively estimated his weight at 600+ pounds.

He took a break from eating to step over away from the feeder to — you guessed it — defecate. Apparently bears don’t always do that in the woods. In this case he left an amazingly large calling card there in my back yard, then calmly went back to finish the remaining seeds. At one point, I remarked to Linda that he had not done irreparable damage to the feeders (a second globe-like feeder had come down with the main one), and I would be able to repair them. That was before he decided that the plastic hemispherical part was an interesting thing to turn on edge and plant his huge paw on. He startled when it shattered, like he never would have expected that.

I cringed in expectation of similar treatment for the other feeder, as it had some fairly inaccessible seeds remaining in the bottom. But no, he stretched his body on the ground before it and very delicately reached in to rake individual seeds to the opening and lick them up one by one. It was all rather comical, the care he took not to further damage the feeder. He did, after a while, gently upend the feeder for the few hold-out grains.

My camera memory exhausted a couple of minutes too soon to catch his exit from the scene. He walked to the power pole at the edge of the woods and eyed the attached transformer. Oh, no! He thinks the transformer is another bird feeder. The brute is going to push it over. He reared up on the pole and looked up, but apparently decided the telephone pole was a better back scratcher than something to work hard at pushing over. Standing with his back to the pole, soon his itch was scratched to bruin satisfaction. He calmly walked off into the woods and that was the last I’ve seen of him.

(I did later discover that a hornet’s nest was in its beginning stages on the bottom of the transformer. Hornet larvae being among the favorite food of bears, I think now that he may have decided that small morsel would not be worth the work to get to it. My guess is that he probably cataloged its location for summer possibilities.)

I was able to repair and rehang the four-gallon feeder and the birds seemed quite appreciative. And that is the story of the visitor who came for breakfast at our house on a very memorial Memorial Day.       

© 2007 R. Leland Waldrip