The Bear is Back

Well, the bear is back.  I was wandering around the house late last night with a turkey baster, watering all my terrariums and I heard a loud banging that sounded suspiciously like the bird feeder I've brought back from total destruction about five times.  I quickly turned on the outside light and saw... nothing.  But the bird feeder was gone so I knew I wasn't crazy.  So I continued with the terrariums and then when I looked out the window again I saw the little bastard pluck my carefully placed hummingbird feeder from the hook in the eave and then decide he wanted nothing to do with it.  He just broke it to be mean and get sticky.  I yelled to the family to come and see the bear and we all kneeled on the couch and gawked at him out the big front window.  He saw us.  He didn't care.

Then the bear sat down and ate the sunflower seeds he spilled from the bird feeder.  He was kind of cute.  I'd say he was about the equivalent bear-size of a ten year old kid.  Mitch said, "He's not a cub, he's probably a year old." God, he bugs me sometimes, with his biology know-it-allness.  I cherish the memory of the time I told him about the book Beast I read by Peter Benchley about a gigantic octopus (or maybe it was a squid?  (Same diff!)) and the octopus kept attacking boats and people and terrorizing them with his giant beak and Mitch scoffed, as if what I was reading was somehow silly and unrealistic and a total waste of time.  Mitch said that octopuses don't have beaks and even if they did, they wouldn't peck boats to pieces with them.  Okay, Mitch is a fresh-water limnologist  (I don't know) so why would he even pretend to know what a giant octopus would do or wouldn't do with his giant beak?  So I looked up octopuses and it turns out they DO have beaks!  HA! SUCK ON THAT, MITCH!

Money shot

And also, most octopuses (octopods?) don't get big enough to attack ships and they are smart enough to accept their limitations so they stick to small things in shells, but I, along with Peter Benchley, have no doubt in my mind that if they found themselves growing big enough to handle a boat with some delicious humans in it, they wouldn't hesitate.

See?

Anyway, back to the bear. We watched him gorge himself on seeds and molest my lilac bush which is now leaning and broken, and then he sat up like a person and looked so cute that it struck me how much I would like to see him ride a bike and now I understand why people train bears to ride bikes.

Then he ran around a little bit and we noticed his front paw was hurt, and then he shook like a dog and so much water came off of him!  He was really wet.  Kira wanted to lure him into the house and I had to remind her of the utter destruction one single wild pigeon can do, imagine what a bear would do? and she didn't really care.  Then he ran off on three legs.  I still have not gone outside to retrieve the remnants of my bird feeders because a) it's raining and b) THERE'S A BEAR OUT THERE!