10 hours Ago
It takes all my self-discipline to adhere to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s admonition to hang my bird feeders only from Dec. 1 through March 31 to reduce conflict with bears. Frankly, I don’t follow their advice.
After losing several pricy feeders to bears, I have cheaper feeders that don’t cause heartbreak if they happen to get destroyed before and after the dates that the DEC says is safe to hang them. So it felt like a betrayal of sorts — I’m unsure whether to blame the bears or the DEC, but certainly not myself — when I returned from a recent trip to find my fancy bird feeders in ruins. This isn’t supposed to happen.
Bears are supposed to be snug in their dens or caves or wherever bears hibernate in the dead of winter. Don’t they read children’s books where Mommy, Daddy and Baby bear are snoring peacefully under their down comforters at this time of year? The metal pole that supported my newest feeder — replacing a beloved feeder that I’d reconstructed on multiple occasions after previous bear and squirrel attacks — was bent almost to the ground. Fortunately, the feeder itself received only minimal damage.
More importantly, my fancy ceramic egg-shaped feeders remained unscathed, except for one of them. The bears destroy it all the time and I glue it back together again. And they destroy it again.
It’s now in so many pieces that restoring it to some semblance of its former ovoid self requires something of the love, expertise and fine motors skills that I suspect art restorers brought to rehabbing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I don’t do jigsaw puzzles, but piecing my feeder back together provides some of the satisfaction that I suspect puzzle enthusiasts find when the final piece falls into place. One might reasonably ask why I keep subjecting my feeders to animal assaults.
When I said that the bear spared my good feeders during its most recent visit, I meant on the first night of its latest destructive campaign. (I haven’t seen it in person; it prefers to drop by in the middle of the night.) A couple of evenings later, it made short work of my fancy, ostensibly empty remaining feeders.
Why don’t I retire the feeders and find something more productive to do with my life like bridge or plein air painting? I’ve wondered that myself. The answer is that birds are my support animals. They turn the barren winter tundra of our isolated home into a house party.
And they’ve become more indispensable than ever. I can look up from doomscrolling the ways Donald Trump and Elon Musk are making fast work of democracy, turning us into an international pariah while cozying up to Russia, weaponizing the Justice Department and making the world safe for measles to watch chickadees, titmice, cardinals, jays, wrens and even flickers cheerfully mobbing our seed and suet feeders. I called up the DEC to find out what was going on.
Are the bears part of some deep state conspiracy? Or perhaps members of the resistance? Republicans or Democrats? It’s all so confusing. Selinda Brandon is the big game biologist for the DEC’s Region 4, which comprises a healthy chunk of the mid-Hudson Valley including Columbia County where I live. She suggested that bears are light sleepers, can awaken to the sound of growling stomachs, and go hunting for high calorie snacks such as black oil sunflower seeds.
The reason they lapse into hibernation, she added, is because they don’t have a food source. Keep feeding them, and they’ll keep coming. I’m reinforcing bad behavior.
Her advice is to take down my feeders for a week or two, hopefully persuading the bears, with the help of freezing temperatures, to go back to sleep. Friends also suggested that I might want to hang my feeders out of bears’ reach. But after consulting with the biologist, it sounds like there’s no such thing.
Bears can climb trees. She’s even aware of them scurrying across ropes and cables. In other words, what we’re talking about here are ravenous giant squirrels.
Brandon didn’t disagree with that characterization. In fact, it sounded to me as if she might even admire bears’ enterprise. “They’re extremely smart animals,” she observed.
“It’s interesting to see what they get up to.” She didn’t answer directly when I asked whether climate change might be to blame, except to say that bears are highly adaptable and that they’re more active during warm winters. However, based on my most recent fuel bill this isn’t one of them.
Again, “It’s food dependent,” she reminded me. “If they’re getting rewarded, they may stay out.” I think I’ve come up with a solution, however imperfect.
I’m taking down my feeders at night. There are several issues with this new regimen. For starters, I need to remember to do it.
My gorgeous crimson egg-shaped feeder got creamed when I forgot; the bear took down not only the feeder but also the thick branch it was hanging from, disfiguring the crab apple tree in the process. And then I’ve got to be willing to brave the arctic temperatures again first thing in the morning when I rehang them. My hope is that when Mr.
Bear arrives in the middle of the night to find the feeders missing he’ll get the a message: go back to bed. But that seems unlikely. As long as there’s any bird seed on the ground, the bear will likely keep returning, according to Brandon.
She reminded me that the DEC’s dates for hanging bird feeders are “general guidelines with the caveat that if you get a bear they need to be taken down.” I neglected to inquire whether there might be funding slushing around the state budget to support victims of bird feeder attacks. The only concession I received was the acknowledgment that in a rapidly changing ecosystem, biologists will remain nimble.
“We might have to change [the dates] on either end,” of the bird feeding season, Brandon granted, “if the bears keep coming out.”.
