We finally saw a bear. We’ve been hearing about bears ever since we bought the farm, but had never seen one. We suspected it had visited when I found the hummingbird feeder post bent over almost to the ground and the feeder broken.
Then I noticed muddy smudges on the windows nearby and on the door into the porch. Below the deck with all the birdfeeders I found a pile of giant scat, and the mat pulled away from the door into the basement. So we wondered about a bear.

That night, as we were having dinner, it arrived.

It seemed like a big one – it lumbered across the gulley next to the driveway, and stopped to eat some of the old birdseed from the compost pile. It must have smelled the eggs in one of the bluebird houses, because it stood up against the post on its hind legs and slowly bent it down until the birdhouse was resting on the ground. It couldn’t get the front open, so the eggs all survived. Then it wandered over to the house to check out the fallen food under the birdfeeders and to see if there was any more sugar water available. We watched it foraging under the feeders from the inside of the glass door to the basement – it was right next to the outside of the glass. That’s the closest I’ve ever been to a bear!

The next morning we found big paw prints on the glass doors – I hope it never decides to come inside the house – that would be a mess! The bluebirds were sitting on their fallen house, looking down through the door. I checked the eggs – they looked fine – so I put up a new post and put the birdhouse back up. The bluebirds went right back to it. I decided to take down the peanut feeders, since I think that’s the source of much of the dropped seed below the deck. I liked seeing the bear once, but I’m not anxious to cope with that much destruction all the time.

The bear didn’t come back the next night, so maybe the bluebirds are safe for a while.

I worked on clearing a small prairie knoll along Fallen Oak Point – it was covered with sumac and prickly ash, but under all that was lots of Prairie Ragwort. I cut and sprayed the shrubs by hand – the ground is too steep and sandy to be able to mow. The lower part of the slope has more Prairie Ragwort, and eventually some shady woods plants – Wild Geranium, Rue Anemone, and even a few Showy Orchis. It will be nice to get it cleared enough to let the prairie plants come back and so we can walk down to see the woodland area.
Here’s the knoll before

And after.

The nice thing about mowing out brush in the early spring is that the plants aren’t harmed, and they start growing right away. Plants are coming up in the most of the areas we’ve mowed in the last few weeks – Rue Anemone, Hoary Puccoon, and lots of Monarda.

I found a beautiful Crane Fly resting on a Starry Solomon’s Seal.

I had bought some knee boots and some waders so we could try cleaning out the sediment from the creek. The knee boots are much too short – the sediment is so deep that when you step in, you sink way down – I was afraid I’d never get the boots out so I didn’t even try to go all the way in. But the hip-high waders work fine. It’s hard to tell whether we can actually clean out the sediment by just raking it. It seems to move downstream and get deposited again – but the bottom gets sandier and we can actually get down to rock – so we’ll keep trying.

There are lots of little invertebrates that live in the stream – I found several kinds of tiny snail shells and some mussel shells. And there are caddis fly larvae cases covered with grains of sand. I’ve ordered a book so I can start to learn about them all.

It was pretty cold and windy so I didn’t see many butterflies – the only new ones were two Cabbage Butterflies circling around each other in the sun behind the house.

And there weren’t many new flowers blooming either. I did find
Hoary Puccoon

and Wild Ginger.