So. The black bear I wrote about in the spring returned this past fall. I only saw evidence of him at first. The trash cans knocked over, and one moved/clawed/chewed on and the contents scattered. After baking in the summer sun, the contents must have been ripe, but I mostly don't throw food away because the raccoons used to be a problem. Anyhoo, i righted the cans, and then noticed that the same something had gotten into the bed of the pickup because the sheet of plywood I had left there was broken. But I expected no more trouble.
Silly me. The bear came back a few more times. The second time, he broke open a plastic storage bench where I kept the bird seed. So I had to package up the bird seed and move it into a livestock trailer I could lock. But the bear had found something I had forgotten was in the storage bench...a bag of bonemeal I used for fertilizing bulbs. So I cleaned that up. The third time the bear came in the night, I heard one of the pacas make a small whimper. I opened the front door to check, and there was a dark shadow extending the normal dark shadow of the storage bench. When I shined a flashlight on him, he ran away.
Thankfully, he did not seem interested in the animals, and the girls in the pasture closest to him did not make a peep (except for that one whimper, so atypical for a normal scared alarm), nor did they run and pack up like they would normally do for a threat. They seemed to realize they better keep quiet and still, and maybe it wouldn't notice them.
The bear came back a couple more times, and each time I tried to do something different to make it unpleasant for him, like set off alarms and air horns to scare him away. There was nothing left to find, investigate, etc. He did, at some point know the smells were in the livestock trailer (where I keep all the animal feed, including, now, the bird seed) because there were prints on the side of the trailer where he had stood up and pushed on it to see if he could break in (nope). And I did find a cache of random bones (bears are scavengers) recently so he must still be swinging by. Especially now I have had my first snowfall on the solstice.
But he seems to have gone into winter mode rather than fatten up mode.
Like the rest of us in this covid year.
