Bear Encounters

In particular, I have read that the bears are challenged in finding enough food to fill their bellies after the long winter. Strawberry blossoms are just starting to peek out, so it will be a while before that fruit is available. The blackflies are still very much with us, and that has me thinking that they haven't finished their job of pollinating the blueberries, so we will wait longer yet for those tasty treats. The foliage on the thimbleberry bushes is still quite small. It all adds up to very little sustenance for the bears. And that means that they are looking elsewhere.

If we have bears in camp, their first stop is the garbage shed. I wrote three years ago how Addie and I were dealing with a bear when Greg and the boys were on a trip to Alaska. That time, I put a hasp with a turning clasp on the shed door, and the bear took one look at it and tossed it on the ground. Never mind that it took me about a half hour to properly install it, with my limited powertool skills. Since then, we haven't had that many intruders, so a new system for locking up the garbage shed has never been installed. When Greg had built the new door some years back, he planned to finish it with quarter iron all around the edge. That way a bear would have a difficult time getting a good purchase on it, as they can with wood. With no immediate need to do this, it fell lower on the priority list.

Until a few weeks ago, that is. I noticed the door open wide on the shed one day, and there on the ground at the base of the porch was all the evidence of a bear binge. We've been through this drill before....we know to follow the trail, with rake and shovel, well into the woods, to pick up the garbage strewn about. This time we were lucky that the shed wasn't very full, so it was only a bag or two that needed to be cleaned up. Greg took care of it, and when he came back inside, he complained that he could still smell bear. I couldn't, so I have no idea what bear smells like.

That day, he cleared his schedule and worked on the door. He put the iron in place, and then worked on a new latch. The one that he came up with, to me, is a real stroke of genius. If a bear can figure this one out, I'll be a monkey's uncle...or aunt, as the case may be.

So far, so good. The garbage has stayed in the shed, and the ground has been clear. We're one step ahead of the bear.

Spring Music in the Woods

We've been having some fun with the white throated sparrows lately. Greg can whistle the exact song of these sweet little birds. One day while we were enjoying our lunch on the side porch, we heard several sparrows singing in the yard. So he started to sing back. It wasn't long before a couple of them flew to the trees near to us, trying to find this new neighbor they were hearing. I got to see a little one in the white pine by the corner of the porch, and was able to capture a photo while he was singing.

I love how they lift up their little heads and how their little chests puff out while they sing.

Another bird enounter we had was with a pair of killdeer. Our neighbors had been telling us about these birds and their behavior. When we looked it up in the bird book, the description fit them to a T. If they have a nest nearby, they will leave it and make a big show of acting like they have an injured wing. This is to distract the "predator" from the nest. We watched both of the birds do this little act several times for us, and as we retreated, they would get up and then find a new spot to do it again. It was quite a thing to watch. We didn't look for the nest, as we didn't want to disturb any little ones. We did get a few photos and video clips of the adults. I am impressed with how well they blend in to the background scenery.

Last week, Paul spotted an indigo bunting in the birch tree right outside of our window. I had not seen one before, so that was a fun sighting. And finally, on a recent walk on the side road, I heard a lot of chittering noises as I approached a large aspen tree. Looking up, I noticed a small hole, and somebody poking a beak out of it. A mama hairy woodpecker flew out, and went to a neighboring tree to peck for insects. While she was gone, those babies in the tree made such a loud ruckus, I thought for a moment that the tree was shaking. She kept up a steady chirp to them, in between her peckings, but it didn't calm them one little bit. I continued on my walk, but paused again as I passed by on my return. The little ones were still making a fuss, though not as loudly. Evidently, their mama must have found enough bugs to keep them satisfied for a bit.

This time of the year it is a real pleasure to wake up early in the morning. The chorus that greets me is a wonderful reminder that spring is really here.

Good Fishing...and Catching

There's been some serious fishing--and catching--going on in these parts lately! The late spring has kept the water temperature on the cool side, and that means that the fish are still in relatively shallow waters. These good looking lake trout were caught by the Olson Family, and they reported having an excellent time fishing. We heard that the bass are biting also. The mosquitoes are biting, too, and I'm told that means that the walleyes will be hungry. I haven't seen many of those since the week after the ice went out. Hopefully reports for those will start rolling in any day now.

Something else rolled in today instead....a big grey cloud of smoke. Greg and I first noticed it mid-morning, while we were out in a boat. This was my first boat ride of the season, and we went to check out the progress of the cabin-building on the lake. I smelled the smoke before I really noticed it. The wind was coming from the northwest, and the far western end of the lake was looking quite hazy. I asked Greg if he thought that maybe he was going to be called upon to go help fight a fire, but he didn't think so. He said that if this was a fire that was nearby and just starting, we would see a plume of smoke, not a blanket. He said that this was probably someone else's fire. Sure enough, when we got home, we learned that it was actually smoke that had blown down from fires in Manitoba and Ontario. We just happened to be in the path that the wind was blowing. It's been so wet this spring, it would have surprised us if the fire had been close to us.

What I found most interesting, though, was how the scent of that smoke in the wind immediately flooded me with memories of a year ago. I was changing beds in Tamarack cabin, and found myself thinking about doing that same task last year, and I could remember for whom I was getting the cabin ready: On Sunday night, it was for our friend Mark, evacuated from the end of the trail. On Tuesday night, it was another friend named Mark, and his son Nathan, coming up from Duluth to help us set up sprinkler heads. Other cabins were in stages of use for Forest Service personnel, the early waves of people working the fire before all of the staging area was in place. I could remember vivid details of the moments in those days. Maybe my memory isn't failing me as badly as I sometimes think it is! I know that the sense of smell is a powerful reminder, and today reinforced that for me.

As I was sitting this evening and knitting on my current sock project, we noticed how pretty the colors were in the sky. They just happened to coordinate with the colors in my yarn. This is another result of the smoke in the air--it often brings beautiful sunsets.

The Rest of the Wolf Story

Back on May 4th, I had the stroke of good fortune to be able to see and photograph a wolf in our yard. The wolf had taken down a deer right behind Greg's workshop, and for the next couple of hours, I watched from a perch just several feet away. You can read my blog post and see some of the photos here.

I re-read it today, and saw that I had not yet followed up with the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say. We kept a fairly close watch on the carcass that evening (when, incidentally, it snowed again). There was no activity, and I was afraid that I had frightened the wolf enough so that he might not come back at all. The biggest nuisance of that possibility would be that we would be left with a bit of a stinky mess to clean up. The next morning, we still saw no indication of the wolf's return, but we did see many ravens and crows, both for real and by their tracks. At least someone was making a meal out of the remains. Interestingly, though, by Tuesday morning, it was ALL gone. Sometime in the night, the wolf finally must have returned and dragged away what remained of the whole deer. All that was left behind were a few tufts of hair.

In the days since, I've had many opportunities to share my story and photos with friends and family. In the process, I've gone over the photos, and have a few more to share with you.

This was taken while I was still in the truck. The wolf had dragged the deer into the driveway from the north edge where he had taken it down.

It wasn't until I had this image on the computer and zoomed in that I realized what had happened. It turns out that the doe was pregnant, and the wolf took the fawn. This was the second photo that I took, and later on I could tell that the wolf was carying off another fawn, so the doe actually would have had twins. On my computer, I can zoom in enough to see that the little one had hair, and was fully formed. It had long, dangly legs. She was probably just a few weeks away from giving birth.

Last weekend, I was sharing the pictures and videos with our friend, Caleb, and his family. He is much more computer savvy then I am, and he offered to put one of the videos on YouTube. (Thank you, Caleb!) Here is a link, so you can see the last couple of moments when I was watching and filming the wolf:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xAercsPcD0