On the fly, 2: A bear pays a morning visit, spreads garbage, and offers a lesson (maybe)

A morning “nosher” may hint that some city-resident-issued bear advice is less than welcome

[This was originally posted August 2, withdrawn, then reposted with edits 8/16/13. This entry was reconditioned for publication, based on developments on August 15. No pointed insinuations of a negative sort about anyone I know outside my household are intended. Edit 10/20/13.]

[This follows up a later July entry viewable here. For earlier entries on natural-world encounters I’ve had this season, see this May entry or this July entry.]

A narrow Fellow in the Grass / Occasionally rides…

—a line (or two) from an Emily Dickinson poem about her suddenly seeing a snake, not the type of critter focused on here [for the full poem, see the end of this entry]

In very late July, I had the notion to write a follow-up to my “bear in the side yard” entry of July 24. There was a subsequent incident I thought worthy of spinning a minor entry about…and then, like an editor, I made a practical decision: a variation on “This doesn’t meet our needs,” more like, “I have better things to work on than this.”

But then came the incident this morning (August 2). And it makes that earlier incident I declined to write on, of about July 29, now a worthwhile prelude.

The incident this morning (August 2) also elevates this entry, I think, above the level of the precious, limited-relevance, “How I scratched my ass in Podunk” type of entry. Because it makes me think—as have other local bear matters over the years—of something that one from my little corner of the world should say to those Manhattanites who have the nerve to insert their voices into the suburban New Jersey bear-related debates with inevitably condescending remarks such as that we need to know, or apply, good ideas for how to handle our garbage. (An example of this was in the newspaper in 2011 or so.)

As if that was all the issue was. As if we wouldn’t know that. As if simple formulaic diktats need to be issued to the déclassé New Jerseyans who seem eminently unable to deal with bears. These diktats from a certain type of New Yorker who would only know about bears from books, a visit to a zoo, or attending some lecture offered in a very civilized venue by a naturalist or some other person or entity concerned with environmental issues. (And of course, in turn, this issue doesn't simply relate to bears and New Jersey middle-class living arrangements, but is symbolic of presumption in our culture more generally.)

The basic facts

First, the prelude: On the Monday before August 2, I believe it was (while August 2 was a Friday), my mother found that a white kitchen-garbage-type bag of garbage had been opened and spread around on the ground in a remote part of our backyard, in an area behind a sort of shed and hidden from view from most directions by trees. If you located the place, the garbage was an eyesore. This was clearly the work of a bear. As we’ve seen enough times, a bear will take a bag of garbage out of a can and carry it some distance before settling down to extract delightful morsels from its contents. (Raccoons are more apt to do their feeding right by the location of a garbage can.) And the garbage had come from some other yard; it clearly wasn’t ours. We didn’t bag garbage in such white kitchen bags (in a situation in which they could be accessed outdoors).

I elected to clean the mess up. Latex gloves, a steely attitude, and picking up the dreck bit by bit defined the task. The garbage seemed to have been at least in part from a party or picnic—there were a bunch of disposable plates. There were little candy-colored, birthday-cake-type candles. Maybe it had come from a party for a little kid. There were also used guitar strings in the mix, with ends twisted from tuning knobs, along with empty Ernie Ball-type packages for new guitar strings. Clearly, the mess had come from a household featuring young people. We weren’t entirely sure where it had come from, but we had one theory.

Then came the incident of August 2.

I was in bed, and was having a fancy dream. It was deep, REM-type sleep, I guess, and ordinarily I wouldn’t have easily woken. Which is unusual for me in recent times (through at least August 2); a lot of times in recent years I’ve slept a bit short, or light toward the end of time in bed (actually--maybe a tedious point--this is true in terms of "years" in a very general sense, but it is particularly true of recent months). But in very recent weeks, I’ve slept longer than usual most or several days of the week. This day (August 2) was one. And it took some distinctly unusual noise outside to wake me up from this deep sleep.

The dog next-door was barking. Pointed, disturbed-type barks. Since settling in within the past three-plus years at the house next-door, that dog (usually kept indoors) sometimes barks, but rarely, and this usually indicates unusual circumstances. The barking today immediately woke me up. I checked the time—about 5:02 a.m. Oh, that was about when the home’s owner got going off to work, so maybe she was getting ready for work. (This is usually an easy enough fact to be aware of, and usually not a bother in my household at all.)

But the dog barking at this time was unusual.

As I lay in bed, I heard some thumping and bumping, as if someone was fumbling with something plastic. I wasn’t really sure, at first, if it was an animal-type noise; I hypothesized maybe the owner was doing something—though (conspicuously noisy) it would have been odd at that time of day—like fastening a kayak to the roof of her car, which she has done once or twice before this season (a relevant fact when explaining, in relation to previous facts, how oddly things happened this particular morning).

I decided to get up for the day, as I had slept long enough overall. I took my time. Poked along through bathroom, kitchen…deliberate preliminaries to a shower. One of my early tasks (as for any typical day) was to go out and check for the newspapers.

It was still a bit dark. The days were shortening enough that now it wasn’t so light out at 5:15 as it had been over a month ago.

I went on the sunporch, which is a sort of transitional part of the house between the kitchen and the outdoors—it is closed in enough (regarding windows and other features) almost to be an integral part of the house. I had the sunporch light on (illuminating its inside), and put on the outdoor light (it was still dim enough outside for that). I had a slight feeling as if I would like my pepper spray with me.

I opened the back door (leading from the sunporch to outside), and there, about 30 feet away, near the end of the driveway, was a 350-pound bear. The situation was almost like a cartoon. He was facing me dead-on, but was somewhat crouched, a bit like a cowed dog. (I think my putting on the light outdoors startled him, and this is why he was postured as he was.) (See End note.) I was surprised to see him, but I had the presence of mind to slip right back into the house, almost like a sudden, comic reversal of the film that had me initially slipping out. I locked the door, and then with eager efficiency, I went to a variety of windows to look out at the bear.

I looked out the living room window, facing in the same direction as the back door I had started out of, but giving a view about 20 feet away from where I’d first seen the bear. It was now on the front lawn, the view obscured a bit by a row of boxwoods, but the bear was clearly relishing some garbage it had carried to the front lawn. This garbage had clearly come from the house next-door.

Getting some consensus, geared to a spectacular event

I went to my mother’s bedroom door; I knew she’d been up to use the WC just earlier. “Are you awake?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. I said, “Look out the window. There’s a bear out there.”

She looked out her window, which also faced the front yard, and she saw at first the garbage, but then—after her initial comments that, perhaps due to her not being fully awake in a sense, were not quite in line with the reality—she saw the bear…and, initial sensation past, she became grossed out, so to speak—both esthetically and a bit morally (explanation to come)—by the spectacle and meaning of the garbage out in the yard, clearly from the house next-door.

At one point I saw the bear with a chunk of garbage in its mouth—which I hypothesized was a meat package, which would naturally be among the more choice items in the debris for a “furry fellow in the grass” of his ilk. (Later I would find such a package in the garbage.)

A yellow garbage can from next-door was in our side yard facing those neighbors. It was the type of can with a big screw-top lid, but as I’d heard more than once from locals who ought to have known, bears can unscrew, or at least pop off, those lids. And certainly this one had. (I would see more direct evidence of this ability on August 15.)

Practical steps taken

There were some things I eventually did to mitigate the mess, but first I elected to shoo away the bear. (I don’t remember the full set of events here, but this synopsis is OK.) This time with Mace in my pocket, I headed outside—it was getting lighter out—and I walked cautiously outdoors. The bear had walked—away from the garbage in the front yard—well across the side yard that is wooded, which I mentioned in the July 24 entry, and (as I’d learned from a state-offered public-educational presentation on bears years ago) I clapped my heads over my head loudly, and this caused the bear to scurry off, away through the thick brush.

It seemed as if it was gone. Similarly to the garbage we had found behind the shed days before, it seemed as if what limited treasures in the debris had been siphoned out, and off the bear had gone to new horizons.

The next task on my agenda was to clean up the garbage in the front yard, which I did not relish, but which I knew I would do. One of my puzzles was where I would get gloves to handle the putrid mess. I certainly would not use my bare hands. (My mother was indignant [this relates to the “moral gross-out” I mentioned earlier] about the idea of the neighbor’s garbage being in our yard, especially in view of the earlier mess of about July 29. She said, more than once, that they should clean it up. But I knew the best move this morning (of August 2)—similar to my removing the earlier mess—was for me to do this, just to be practical and timely—because for one thing, the mess should be removed before the bear [if it returned], or some other wildlife, came upon it.)

In the midst of various hubbub, with me back in the house, my mother said the bear had returned to the garbage. I looked out, and sure enough. There must have been something especially worth treasuring there (because the bear had to have wandered back from 50-100 feet away, wherever I’d last seen him ambling off).

This time—it was around 6 a.m.—my mother was intent on setting off her car alarm, with key button pressed from her safe position inside the house—this was a sort of measure she’s talked about to scare off a bear, in the past. I said now, don’t do that, it was still early; people were in bed. She said she didn’t care…and as I was heading outside to deal with the bear with hand claps and such, the car alarm started its repeated tooting. It was a ruckus.

In apparent response, someone from the house next-door shone a flashlight outside (the main homeowner, who normally leaves for work at about 5:20, was already gone). More on the practical disposition of the neighbor who was still around, later.

By the time I got to the front yard, the bear had headed off to a side part of our yard, in the opposite direction of the wooded side yard, and toward the house next-door from where the garbage had come. I cautiously headed a bit in the bear’s direction, and clapped my hands. It scurried off. From one angle—I took different positions in the yard—I saw something excrete from its rear as it moved along.

At some point I headed back indoors amid the touch-and-go activity. The bear headed off across the main road behind our house, now seeming definitely off to a whole new venue. Enough commotion, it might have “thought”—that garbage wasn’t worth all the risk.

There was a point where I got into the car and sat there, attending to some initial odds and ends (related to my office-related stuff there) prior to my own eventually heading off for my day. But I was also keeping an eye on the unsightly “flowerbed” of garbage about 20 feet away, ready to start my own ruckus if Mr. Bruin returned.

Mitigation embraced (with metaphorical nose-holding needed), and lessons considered

[Note: This isn’t meant to embarrass the neighbor, but to illustrate the kind of practical situations bear encounters put all of us New Jerseyans in.]

Long story short, I got a pair of heavy leather gloves I use for yard work and picked up the garbage, bit by disgusting bit. It was smelly, suggestive of “fermenting” time outdoors in summer temperatures. And there was indeed a meat package (having dealt with animal-dispersed garbage from another’s yard before [not only the current neighbors], I assert that the worst kind of garbage to deal with is someone else’s meat garbage [this is not meant to be a slight to the current neighbors]). There were old, dented onions, and yogurt cups.

All the mess went into two black garbage bags I’d gotten out. I put all the foreign garbage into my two bags, closed them up, and put them in the neighbor’s garbage can in our yard. I had difficulty screwing the cumbersome lid back on.

All the while, the owner of the house was long gone—as I said, she had left about 5:20, and there was no chance for us to have any exchange. But—after my mother had set off the car alarm, and I was back outside—another resident of the house (this one a working-age male) had been outside, looking around, having apparently been aware earlier of the wild visitor, and he ambled in the front yard, with dog accompanying him (this time the dog was quiet, as it usually was). He seemed quite oblivious to me (a row of hemlocks forms a barrier between our properties, and obscures much visually).

And I wasn’t going to call over to him or otherwise trade notes yet about the bear; I had my own cleanup task at hand, and I felt it wasn’t incumbent on me to initiate talk with him, it was more he who should have initiated talk with me. At one point, as I was placing the rebagged garbage that had been on our lawn into the garbage can of the neighbors', which was still in our yard, I watched the man head rather singlemindedly to his car to leave for work, seeming quite oblivious (willingly or otherwise) to my dealing with the garbage can situation. He had no curiosity to look my way. In any event, I definitely anticipated talking to the neighbors later in the day about this. (And she, he, and I were all more interested in getting off to work anyway—something I couldn’t entirely fault him for, as he left me tending to the garbage. By the way, he's the one other resident of the house who works regularly. Again, relevant in relation to the bear exigency. But this is not to imply that only student-age children living in the home should be the ones who should muck around with the debris left by a marauding bear.)

With the garbage picked up, bear long gone, gloves set aside for careful decontamination, it was now time for a more normal phase of my day, getting ready for my own workday on the road.

Before I went to go shower, I walked around the street in the utilitarian boots I wore for the garbage pickup task. The house across the street I often go to had one of its own garbage cans knocked over, which could have well been caused by this bear, though it had no garbage in it this time, only shovels. A couple weeks ago or so, garbage had been in the can (an unusual occurrence), and a critter had knocked the can over and ripped open the bag.

So, in short, this summer we’ve had visitations from a bear several times (raccoons can also get into garbage, but with my aving seen direct evidence of recent visits by a bear, it would seem a bear has been most to blame lately).

We deal, we mitigate, we try to come up with solutions….

(Update: Later on August 2, my mother actually talked to the [female] owner of the house next-door, when the latter got home, and while I was still on the road. Among other things in what was a relatively brief conversation, they exchanged phone numbers, the first time for this since those neighbors had moved in over three years before. There was never an occasion that day, or on subsequent days, on which the owner, or the other person who regularly goes to work from there, made any move to talk to me about any of this.)

Bottom line

But one thing we do not need is, when (as a more general governmental-move matter) the issue of the New Jersey bear hunt comes up, some Manhattanite making some ex cathedra pronouncement about how we rank-and-file denizens of the exurbs, as the unspoken not-entirely-complimentary implication seems to be, need to be educated on how we handle garbage. We don’t need that (or, not all of us needs exactly and only that). We certainly have heard enough different ideas. There have been enough different garbage cans, with varying degrees of “bear-proof” qualities, marketed.

Dealing with bears—as with so much else in these pragmatic, multiform-problems United States—does not admit of formulaic, blanket, sure-to-work solutions. Not that I favor a bear hunt—I don’t; but I usually also don’t take sides in that issue. If it were up to me, I’d preserve all the bears. But when it comes to issues of bears getting into garbage—a prime reason they have been fruitful and multiplied so remarkably in this state—this is a complex, not-easily-answered problem. There are little “subsidiary” aspects of the problem that can be addressed, like dealing with the practical issues of specific households.

But the fact that it is hard to prevent all the bears from doing the incursions into human-household situations as they do is what makes grounds for some to support a hunt (aside from how some people have specific horror stories of having an encounter with a bear), and far be it from me, for one, to take a stand and try to argue against many other people who, in good enough conscience, feel the best solution (for what is considered by others in this more broadly-defined bear situation an intractable problem) is to have a hunt from time to time.

I can roll with the blows with this situation, while others choose to opt for a more programmatic solution. This is like so much else in this state (as well as the country): not everybody is going to think the same, and sometimes the more genuine (and true to your own ideals) you are from your own practical standpoint, the more you’ll be overruled from others of a perhaps less-sensitive (and/or less-sensible) school of thought.

But overall, dealing with garbage-scrounging bears is something of a whack-a-mole problem. You seem to have an answer in one location, and then a need for an answer in another. Fortunately, the worst of it is only a few months in the summer and maybe the fall.

This bear, by the way, had a tag in his ear. Thus he’s apparently had a meet-and-greet (with tranquilizer employed) with the state Fish & Wildlife department before. Who knows what his fate may end up being in the future.

As for me, I did what I could with his morning visit, and in the midst of it, I apparently scared some poop out of him. I think we both learned, if that, that you can have some weird unexpected twists on an early start to your day, with maybe a bit of food of thought to go with your morning repast.

End note.

Later I would find a pile of bear scats near where I first saw him, which maybe he did (put into fight-or-flight mode) in response to my surprise appearance. As I’ve said before, bears can sometimes be scared by the sudden arrival of a human, scared enough to take a crap in response. Some years ago, I’ve seen a bear shoot out urine as it scurried along when surprisedly it saw me appear.