We were hoping to leave our apples on the trees for a couple more weeks but this young guy came by to check out the crop.
He is a young bear that we hadn’t seen since early Spring. This is his first Summer without his mother but he is looking very healthy.
Unfortunately he has very little fear of humans and I think that will be a problem in coming years. After unsuccessfully trying to climb one apple tree that I had temporarily ringed with sheet metal, he tried to push over the fence into the garden to get the apples from our dwarf trees. It was then that I had to intervene. I went out to scare him away but that didn’t phase him much, he made a half-hearted climb up a fir tree and then headed for another old apple tree and sat down for a scratch.
After checking out the apples above, up he went.
It looked like he had settled in so I had to get out the garden hose and give him a spray. He quite like it at first but then became annoyed and ran off into the woods. Needless to say, we picked our apples – 60 pounds that didn’t end up in a bear’s stomach.
Hard-To-Come-By Lifestyle 