Giant Turkeys

Tomorrow may be the official start of autumn, but there was something very autumnal about the way we woke up this morning.  There we were, asleep, and suddenly Murgy starts growling.  This is a serious but low-so-as-not-to-cause-too-much-alarm growl that only occurs when something out of the ordinary is happening (bears, snow, the fireplace turning itself on once before we knew how that worked).  Tired, I told her to "shhh" because I myself didn't hear anything odd.

Awake, Garret left to go make some coffee.  As soon as he was gone, Murgy hopped up by the window on his side of the bed and started barking.  I always like to be right, even with the dog, so I promptly hopped up by the window so that I could say, "See, there's nothing there!".  However, there was something there: five giant turkeys!

I mean GIANT.  I did not take a picture, which I'm kind of proud of myself for.  Maybe I'm learning to just "live" life a little more and not see everything as a potential blog post (er... I say as I... post about it in my blog).  Anyway, we went downstairs to get a better look out of the window in my office/the guest room.  These things were HUGE!  I am telling you, they were like, the size of a sheep.  Garret said, "They're like DINOSAURS!".  (I think he was referring to the fact that they were so out-of-place large that they seemed prehistoric.  They weren't roaring or anything.)

Happy Fall!

Tomorrow Tracy is headed out to attend the Vermont Wine & Harvest Festival with us.  We were all set to go last year but it got cancelled because of Irene, so we're excited to finally have our wine festival date one year later.  On a separate little note, I find it pretty *awesome* that The Vermont Wine & Harvest Festival's web address is simply "thevermontfestival.com".  I guess the Wine & Harvest Festival is THE festival.  Be there or be square, VT!

In other news, we still don't have a garbage can.  A bear ate ours two months ago and since then we've been trying to get a new one... but we need a special one, because it has to be bear proof (that's right: lesson learned, bears!).  Our landlord ordered us one a million years ago, but then there was a fire in the bear-proof garbage can factory (???) and then something else happened (???) and we still have yet to see the arrival of this so-called garbage can.  Maybe some day...

It stands to reason that there's bears running that bear-proof garbage can factory, though, and they're just trying to keep us from getting a can in the hopes that they'll get more of our pic-a-nic baskets.

honestly though, (bears).

So, the whole bears-in-the-yard thing has been a real emotional roller coaster. You can glean all of this by psychoanalyzing my tone in past posts (I mean, if you want...?) but I've gone through a real process with my enthusiasm/non-enthusiasm for these bears. It's like its own several-step grieving process. 

 1. Excitement! Garbage has been strewn all over the driveway and I am frankly giddy over it (I am also not the one who has to clean up the garbage. Thanks, Garret!) and I am oddly defensive when anyone suggests that since I did not see a bear throw the garbage everywhere, it could technically be something else.  I'm all like, "Um, no, it's totally a bear..."  

2.  Mystified!  When one night we are sitting on our deck and the bear actually ambles up to the driveway, silently, I am wide-eyed and amazed to be seeing such a giant, awesome creature.  (I am also a little like "HAH! Told you so, naysayers!") 

3.  "Oh, again?"  Once I saw the bear in person, I was rather immediately of the attitude that, alright, we've done this.  Go away now, bear.  

4.  "WHAT?!"  When a bear shows up at 11am and I have to call the Sheriff because I can hear children playing down the hill, I am definitely getting a bit eye-rolly toward bears. 

5.  "OH COME ON. GO AWAY." When, a week later, it's nighttime and Garret and I are enjoying a glass of wine on the deck, and a bear helps herself to our garbage as though we invited her over but didn't provide her with dinner, I'm very over the bears.  Especially when we yell at her to go away and she basically just looks at us like, "Oh, please."  

6.  "When does hibernation start?" A bear ripped our garbage box apart the other day.  We're awaiting a new one.

We have been in touch with the police station a few times, and they put in word to the warden about little miss steals-the-garbage.  At the beginning of my apparent six-step process, I thought this was just kind of a cute fun thing that would be a one-time experience.  By step 5 when we were literally shining lights at a bear and yelling at it and it wasn't even blinking an eye, I was very concerned.  They're supposed to be afraid of people and when they're not, it's problematic.

We haven't seen her in a while, nor does she have any garbage to get from us anymore since our box is destroyed.  From what I can tell from research, bears typically prowl a fairly large radius, and they're solitary within that radius.  So it's possible she's over in another neighborhood and maybe the warden has actually gotten her and we don't know about it.

Then again, there's always the good chance I'll go outside on any given day and she'll just be lounging in a chair in my front yard, sipping lemonade and getting a suntan.

Bear(s) in the yard!

11:08: There is a bear in my yard right this moment! Garret is working today, and Murgy and I were enjoying a quiet rainy morning of coffee and card designing. About an hour ago, she started barking. Like, crazy barking. The kind of barking she does when she has reason, not when she's just having fun. At first I thought there was a mouse in the house, which would really annoy me, because Garret is not home and I do not want a tiny dead mouse in the house to deal with. Well, instead, I got a 400 pound black bear mama. (Is it sad that I am honestly less afraid of the bear, considering I am up on a second floor deck?) I could hear kids playing at the bottom of the hill, and the prospect of this bear taking off in their direction terrified me, so I called the police. They sent a sheriff. Right before he arrived, I noticed something slinking up the tree, which I thought might be a cat, but we know now is actually a bear cub. The police tried to scare the bear with the blowhorn, but once he saw that it was definitely a cub, he said mama isn't going to go anywhere without baby (makes sense). So the huge black bear is sitting at the bottom of this tree, where she's been for almost an hour now! I believe the police are making the rounds on the street letting people know. 11:13: UPDATE! Mama is climbing the tree! OMG. She climbed up and is now resting up by baby. 11:26: Mama is back on the ground. As far as I can tell, baby is still up in the branches. Cars are driving by slowly to get a peek. Murgs is in the living room freaking out. I'm staying on the deck as long as I can! 11:35: Baby bear on the way down. 11:37: SURPRISE! Two baby bears end up leaving. Pictures and videos to come!

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.

BEAR ATTACK!!!

Okay, so, we didn't see a bear.  But all signs are pointing to a bear (or a dinosaur, or an elephant, or - something big!) helping him or herself (gotta be politically correct, people! we just can't just assume it was a he) to our garbage last night.

Garret took Murgy out before bed last night as is typical.  Murgy has a variety of barks and cries that she employs for different situations.  For example, she barks in this high-pitched "hello?!?" way when she wants you to do something with her.  She cries the saddest little mourning cry ever when she accidentally kills one of her moth friends.  And she growls if Garret or I are giving another dog attention, teeth and all. What an overly protective dog.

So anyway Garret takes her out last night and she's apparently doing her sad/curious/I Really Want To Go Over There cry toward the road.  Garret didn't think much of it because as of late, it's been apparent to us that Murgy is preparing to film her audition tape for Best Dog Chipmunk Hunter.  She always wants to go somewhere, because there just might be a chipmunk there.  In hindsight, I guess she was "spooked" but another reason this didn't get mentioned to me is that Garret was spooked due to there being new neighbors across the street who he didn't realize were home and yet were still watching TV and lighting candles in their house (GHOSTS!).

Well, this morning, Garret took Murgy out again (dogs! they always need to go out!) and he found a surprise at the end of the driveway at the very place Murgy had been crying toward.  Our garbage can, which is a wooden box that is supposedly "bear proof" had been knocked over, and all of the garbage bags have been ripped open.

The scene of the crime. BEAR ATTACK IN VERMONT!

The normally nailed down garbage bin, completely turned over.

We're figuring it must have been a bear because:

-  If it were a person trying to steal our identity by going through our garbage, this is a supremely strange neighborhood to go identity huntin' in and also why not just open the can like a normal person.

-  If it were a deer, fox, possum, turkey, beaver, or raccoon, the task of knocking the entire wooden box over (it's heavy!) seems a bit extreme/impossible.

-  As Hanna-Barbera allowed to enter the history books of cartoonish time, bears do really love pic-a-nic baskets.

-  On the other hand, Hanna-Barbera also taught us that not all bears are smart, as Yogi who was (no offense) no genius was "Smarter than the average bear." But then again, it doesn't take a brilliant mind to knock over a garbage can, just a hungry one.


Anyway, hopefully this does not become a recurring problem.  Our garbage is always tied up and everything.  We'll have to see if it happens again.

strangers in the night

at present i'm sitting on the couch - feet up (as though that will save me from moths) with murgy, creeped out, because when she went for her last walk the porch light was on and apparently a million little flies and quite a few moths followed she and garret into the house when they came back inside.

as predicted, i'm a bit afraid of nature.  garret says he can tell how severe the incidence of nature is by my "EEEP!" (small "eeep" is for a small bug on the bathroom floor, big "eeep!" is for something fast and furry like a mouse or chipmunk or GOD FORBID a garden snake within fifty feet of me).  mostly i'm wary of nature finding its way indoors (hence the creepy feeling surrounding the tiny flies).

i'm not terrible, though.  i've been surprisingly low-key about this spider, who until we had company over on friday and swept the entire deck for cobwebs, was living in a web only a few feet from the table where i drink coffee and read/write a lot.  and he's like, the creepiest thing i've ever seen.  ever.  but there's something about him being in his web that puts me at ease, i guess.

a real photo garret and i took of the real spider that was
really living on our deck (for real).

other fun things we've seen are this newt (salamander? i don't know. nature experts, elementary school science teachers, science museum curators? any ideas? i seem to recall from 4th grade science that one can regenerate its tail and the other can't, but the memory is fuzzy aka likely inaccurate and i also didn't attempt any tail regeneration experimentation on this little guy) which we found while out on a walk one day:

and these deer, who were happily eating a neighbor's flowers as we drove by:

we also so some wild turkeys, but they were too fast for us to snap a picture and even if they hadn't been, i was too "OHMYGODCOOLATURKEY!" to think to get the camera.

the thing we haven't quite gotten used to yet is the sound of little creatures making their way through the woods that are our backyard at night.  the air is so dark here at night that i can't even see my hand if it's right in front of my face.  even when the moon is bright.  it's that kind of darkness where if it weren't for the physical sensation, you wouldn't really know whether your eyes were open or closed.  and it's very still, too.  and we're still, because it's so dark.  there's something very soothing about just how dark it is - it's almost like a blanket made of the most safe and nostalgic feeling you could ever find. the lights go out, and quietly you lay, until sleep comes.

or, until...

crack!  crack!  crack!

a sound from the woods (read: tiny twigs breaking) two floors down, and suddenly the adrenaline is in alarm mode.  murgy leaps up, growls a bit.  garret or i whisper to one another (whisper! as though the raccoon in the woods might hear us?) "did you hear that?" and the other will say "yes".  and then we'll lay very, very still - like a kid who was told by his parents to go to sleep hours ago, but has secretly been up reading comics, and now mom and dad are walking down the hall and he desperately doesn't want to get caught.  we wait until it passes, and then the hot goosebumps of fear cool a bit, and then it starts again.  murgy's scared, the humans are scared, and all of what?

things that go bump in the night will never cease to scare people, i guess.  in the light of day i realize how silly it all is - even if it were to be - worst case scenario - a bear, what harm will he do to us, two floors up, inside a locked house?  but there's something about the unknown... about the fact that even on the rare occasions that we (okay, fine, garret) build up the courage to peek out the window, it's too dark to see anything... the mystery of it all is terrifying.

there is an owl who hoots from time to time, though, who i especially like, because i guess i had never heard an owl before him.