Design

Late afternoon yesterday, I noticed that the seed feeder was pulled down on its side.  I remarked half-joking, to my gardening companion, who had been at his table downstairs busily working, "hey, I think a bear's knocked down the bird feeder.  Surely, you'd have noticed, I said."  He said, "sure, I'd have noticed that and went outside to check the feeder." That's when he saw the culprit, a young male black bear, who'd had an excellent snack, washed down with the sugar water in the adjacent hummingbird feeder, disappearing back down the ravine. I didn't manage to get my camera in time, but we did have a good laugh about his not noticing that a bear was at the bird feeder basically just a stone's throw from the windows! In the mountains of North Carolina, black bear populations are high enough that young bears (usually males) sometimes wander into urban areas.  We're close to downtown Asheville here in the mountains, so it seems pretty...

Visiting the Western North Carolina Nature Center for the first time (encouraged by the seasonal butterfly house), we enjoyed an up-close view of some native mammals, reptiles, and amphibians that we normally don't see. Bobcats, red wolves, gray wolves, gray fox, and coyotes were among them, but our favorites included a very lively male bear (he splashed and played in a large pool with a rope toy, climbed a tree, rolled a log, and clambered up a tree stump). A river otter, waiting for dinner, posed on a rock. And these turtles, in an attractive turtle pond, basked quite close on several logs, strategically placed. (I wish we had a small pond like this in the Children's Garden at the SC Botanical Garden!)

Normally, I think of encouraging toads, woodpeckers, box turtles, chipmunks, dragonflies, butterflies, and owls as a desirable consequence of creating wildlife habitat in our gardens. Seed-eating birds of all sorts enjoy visiting feeders, of course, and hummingbirds readily slurp up sugar water. There are plenty of adaptable critters, too, that are well-suited to suburban life and can be pesky (think skunks, opossums, and squirrels). Much to our surprise, though, just before lunch, an unexpected visitor discovered the black oil sunflower seed feeder outside our small house in the mountains. It didn't take long for this young Eastern black bear to bend down the feeder pole (I should have bought the cast iron one, not the aluminum one) and deftly help himself (probably 'him' not 'her') to the entire contents of the feeder, mouthful by mouthful. There is a heavily wooded ravine below, but we're at the highest point, and there's not much of an obvious wildlife ...