AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Yep, that's a black bear. It scared the living hell out of me, too, since the most dangerous thing I'd seen in my yard to date was a wandering moose looking for twigs. Once we got Ripley inside and safe, and we pulled Nick into the house to stop taking cell phone pictures, we watched the bear head out of the neighbor's yard and directly across the street to complete its mission.
GARBAGE!
Most people in our neighborhood either keep their trash inside (us) or they have bear-proof garbage cans. These neighbors have the bear proof cans, but they aren't so bear proof when you don't close them all the way, it seems (who would have thought?). Side note - doesn't he look like a human peering in the fridge for a snack?
The bear quickly decided that he needed to dump the garbage out in order to take a full inventory.
And then he started tearing into the bags.
We sat in our front room and on the front porch (once we realized he was a good distance away and had no interest in coming to eat anything at our house...obviously he hadn't spied Fro, who is basically the cat equivalent of kobe beef) and watched the bear rifle through the garbage for a good 30 minutes.
Thankfully the neighbors weren't home and we yelled at the other neighbors to go back inside when they took their kids out to play. Andy, and our next door neighbor, Kelly, who also grew up here, had never really seen bears in town before this. I'm hoping this is the last one we see, and I'm hoping the neighbors learned their lesson about keeping garbage outside.
The big bonus was that Nick and Miranda got to see a bear on their trip! Not so excited that he was in our yard, but still very cool.
Sadly, though, at this point, Miranda had struck out on her mission to find a moose, and they were flying out on Monday afternoon. We finally decided that we were all going to get up at 6am Monday morning and drive out to Kincaid Park where we would have at least a fighting chance of seeing one.
Much to Miranda's dismay we woke up early and jumped in the car. We first tried a couple of hot spots near the house where we see moose most mornings on the way to work (including pretty much every morning this week...go figure), but we were unsuccessful.
Then we drove to Kincaid Park on Minnesota, a main highway in town that typically has moose around it...no luck.
Finally, we drove into the park and just before we reached the entrance, Andy slammed on his breaks and told me to grab the camera, because he'd just spotted this guy:
Success! And! It was a bull moose with his horns coming in, which was pretty cool to see. Thankfully this one was so sleepy that he let me get out of the car and take his picture for proof that Miranda got to see her moose.
We drove home and took a nap and then went out for one last lunch before taking the Woods to the airport. We had an excellent looooong weekend with them and really enjoyed showing them our new (old to Andy) home and seeing some stuff that was new to us, too. Come back soon, Nick and Miranda!
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