Friday, May 4, 2012

A bear raid at the seed stash

Posted by Kirk
We had an interesting visitor to the nature center this week. On Monday night a Black Bear decided to swing by. Tuesday morning we found the feeder pole outside the preschool room completely flattened.

Preschool feeder pole flattened

About 10 feet down the sidewalk is our back staircase. We store the bird seed under the stairs in custom designed garbage cans with locking tops. Something had chewed on the large stair beam.

Chewing on the stairs post.
More than that though, something had simply walked though the decorative lattice work. We were clearly dealing with a bear.

New bear entrance.

The most impressive thing was still under the stairs. The bear had opened the top of the trash can like it was made of paper.

Nothing here to stop a bear.


Tuesday night we set out a motion activated camera and sure enough the bear came back. This adult bear likely weighs 300 pounds.

The bear came back for more Tuesday night.

You can see the bear behind the lattice work.

We completely removed all seed from the area as we didn't want to habituate the bear to coming to the nature center for food. We set up the motion activated camera again on Wednesday night and set it to video. Here's what we captured. Be sure to make the video full screen as it is nighttime and a little dark.




Hopefully with no more food around he will stop coming. They sure are impressive animals.

~Kirk

2 comments:

Janet White said...

That is an amazing video - ok, so what camera do you have that does video? COOL stuff.

And out here in Colorado the bears are also out and active again - one got a bonanza of trash when he figured out how to open the garage door. Needless to say, it's now a locked garage door.

Kirk said...

The video is from a Primos Truth Cam 35. I recommend the new bushnell camera in the "naturalist store" link at the top of this page. Look on page 2 of phenology gear. The bushnell camera does video too. It is smaller, runs on AA batteries and costs less.