It takes all my self-discipline to adhere to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s admonition that I hang my bird feeders only from December 1st through March 31st, to reduce conflict with bears. Frankly, I don’t follow their advice. After losing several pricy feeders, I have cheaper second string feeders that don’t cause heartbreak if they happen to get destroyed in the early fall or late spring.
So it felt like a betrayal of sorts — I’m sure whether to blame the bears or the DEC, but certainly not myself — when I returned from a recent trip to find my fancy high season bird feeders in ruins. This isn’t supposed to happen. Bears are supposed to be snug in their dens, or caves or wherever bears hibernate in the dead of winter. Don’t they read children’s books where Mommy, Daddy and Baby bear are snoring peacefully under their down comforters at this time of year?
The metal pole that supported my newest feeder — replacing a beloved feeder that I’d reconstructed on multiple occasions after previous bear and squirrel attacks — was bent almost to the ground. Fortunately, the feeder itself survived. More importantly, my fancy ceramic egg-shaped feeders remained unscathed. All but one of them.
On the edge of the woods, the bears destroy that one all the time and I glue it back together again. And they destroy it again. It’s now in so many pieces that restoring it to some semblance of its former ovoid self requires something of the love, expertise and fine motors skills that I suspect art restorers brought to rehabbing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I don’t do jigsaw puzzles but piecing my feeder back together provides some of the satisfaction that I suspect puzzle enthusiasts find when the final piece of a thousand-piece puzzle falls into place.
One might reasonably ask why I keep subjecting my feeders and my family to animal assaults? When I said that the bear spared my good feeders during its most recent visit — by the way I haven’t seen it in person; it prefers to drop by in the middle of the night — I meant on the first night of its latest vindictive campaign. A couple of evenings later it made short work of my fancy, ostensibly empty remaining feeders.
Why don’t I just retire the feeders and find something more productive to do with my life? Such as taking up bridge or plein air painting? I’ve wondered that myself. The answer is that birds are my support animals. They turn the barren winter tundra of our isolated home into a house party. And they’ve become more indispensable than ever.
I can look up from doom scrolling the ways Donald Trump and Elon Musk are making fast work of democracy, turning us into an international pariah while cozying up to Russia, weaponizing the Justice Department and making the world safe for measles, to watch chickadees, titmice, cardinals, jays, wrens and even flickers cheerfully mobbing our seed and suet feeders. They were here before we colonized this place and, I suspect, shall slam the door behind us when we move on to Mars or wherever.
I called up the DEC to find out what was going on? Selinda Brandon, the big game biologist for the DEC’s Region 4 — that includes a healthy chunk of the mid-Hudson Valley, including Columbia County where I live — suggested that bears can be aroused from slumber during warm winters and then go hunting for high calorie snacks such as black oil sunflower seeds. The reason they lapse into hibernation, she added, is because they don’t have a food source. Keep feeding them and they’ll keep coming. I’m reinforcing bad behavior. Her advice was to take down my feeders for a week or two, hopefully persuading the bears, with the help of our current cold spell, to go back to sleep.
Friends also suggested that I might want to hang my feeders out of bears’ reach. But after consulting with the biologist it sounds like there’s no such thing. Bears can climb trees. She’s even aware of them scurrying across ropes and cables. In other words, what we seem to be talking about here are ravenous giant squirrels.
Ms. Brandon didn’t disagree with that description. As a matter of fact, it sounded to me as if she might even admire bears’ enterprise. “They’re extremely smart animals,” she observed. “It’s interesting to see what they get up to.”
She didn’t answer directly when I asked whether climate change may be to blame, except to say that bears are highly adaptable and that they’re more active during warm winters. However, based on my most recent fuel bill this isn’t one of them. Again, “It’s food dependent,” she reminded me. “If they’re getting rewarded they may stay out.”
Blame the messenger, why don’t you. But I think I’ve come up with a solution, however imperfect. I’m now taking down my feeders at night. There are several reasons why this new regimen won’t work. For starters, I need to remember to do so. My gorgeous crimson egg-shaped feeder got creamed when I forgot; the bear took down not only the feeder but also the thick branch it was hanging from, disfiguring the crab apple tree in the process. And then I’ve got to be willing to brave the arctic temperatures again first thing in the morning when I rehang them.
My hope is that when Mr. Bear arrives in the middle of the night to find the feeders missing he’ll get the message and go back to bed. But that seems unlikely. As long as there’s any bird seed on the ground the bear will likely keep returning, according to Ms. Brandon. She reminded me that the DEC’s dates fo hanging bird feeders are “general guidelines with the caveat that if you get a bear they need to be taken down.”
The only concession I received was the acknowledgment that in a rapidly changing world wildlife biologists will remain nimble. “We might have to change [the dates] on either end,” of the bird feeding season, Ms. Brandon granted, “if the bears keep coming out.”
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
