seriously though - this time, we saw the bear.

A black bear in our neighbor's yard in Wilmington, VT.

Meet our new neighbor!

Well, firstly, we actually DO have new neighbors - human ones.  It's kind of funny because we live in what is technically a "second home community," which means just about every house here is used as someone's getaway/vacation home. It also means that most every house in our (rather large) development is empty on any given day.  A couple of weeks ago, a moving truck pulled up in front of the house directly across the street from us and some very loud people started populating the front yard, which is their favorite place to yell at one another.  I think that actually they probably aren't that loud but the acoustics of the houses being right across from one another on a mountain happen to be very amplifying.  For a few horrifying seconds we thought that they were moving there full time, thus eliminating our peace and quiet, and general feeling of WeOwnThisMountain, but they're part-timers just like the rest. Phew.

But of course then there's the BEAR neighbor who made his first in-person appearance last evening.  I had written a few weeks back about a "bear attack" on our garbage can, but as I openly admitted in that post, we hadn't actually seen the bear.  We were assuming.  Our garbage was attacked again two nights ago.  Garret found the remnants of my birthday party all over the street and in the neighboring yards yesterday morning around 8am.  Then, around 8pm, we were sitting on the deck (which is a second story deck) and I happened to see a very slow moving flash of black fur make its way across the bottom of our driveway.

We picked up Murgy to hold her, as though for some reason her being loose on the deck was going to make this bear capable of levitation to the second story where, clearly, he would float up to eat her little cream puff of a doggy self.  She got the idea something was up quickly and in my arms began to growl at the bear.  I asked her to be quiet but she continued to growl.  Man, she'd be awful in a zombie attack - terrible at being quiet, that dog is.  The bear looked in our direction, but really didn't seem to interested in us.

So, my "train Murgy to run around the yard without a leash" trial has been put on hold, and we've done plenty of reading about black bears.  Particularly black bears in Vermont on a pamphlet I found online that is appropriately called "Black Bears in Vermont".  Apparently they don't tend to be very aggressive toward humans, and spring is the time when they're scavenging for food because berries and such haven't quite grown yet and they've just come out of hibernation hungry.

Nevertheless, we're going to be extremely cautious.  I have a contingency plan for if I'm on a walk and see one (run the nearest vacant house and climb into their deck/try to break into their home?) and when Garret walks little Murgs at night I'm going to stand on the deck and keep watch.

Which I tried to do last night, but then a winged thing started diving at my head.  It was half bat and half fairy, I'm telling you.  So I fled indoors.

Spring is apparently a very interesting time in the lovely Green Mountain State.



.lsm.