Bird and deer and A BEAR! Oh my!

The bear is my entry for @knowledge-seeker’s #homesteadphotography contest:

Do trail cam photos count? :)

We hadn’t lived on our shiny new homestead for very long, before my trusty Droll Yankees bird feeder went missing. A couple days later I found it in the woods off the side of the driveway, looking like this:

boohoo!

A bear also dragged our trash, which we had set out for collection, across the road and busted it all open in the woods behind our mailbox. That was around the same timeframe that I had gone down to check the mail one day and startled the bear, which went crashing away through the woods. So picture me with the Husband’s .45 making one side of my (beltless) jeans sag crazily off my hip while I muttered imprecations and navigated among the “jagger bushes” to scoop a week’s worth of trash back into the can, watching the kids with one eye and watching for bears with the other. It turned out to be an uneventful incident, though.

Until the past couple months, I would take my replacement bird feeders out first thing in the morning and bring them in at night. I’ve slacked off lately, but I’ll probably have to resume that routine once the weather starts warming up!

Deer are a constant presence around here:

This just happens to be the only picture I could easily get a hold of

So are birds. This handsome fellow spent a couple days hanging around the house, tapping on the windows with his beak :)

Now that we have chickens, visitors like this are a fairly regular occurrence in the barn, along with raccoons and skunks. There’s a black snake living inside the barn too, but it doesn’t bother anything, so we don’t bother it :)

Hey, where’s my chicken dinner?

Typing this post has been interesting. This is what we woke up to, and school is cancelled...

So instead of dropping my children off at school, and Steeming in cozy peace with a cup of strong coffee at my favorite hippie hangout, while the Husband goes to an appointment—I’m typing on my phone in a waiting room, which has mightily sparked the phenomenon that Mommy is trying to WORK! Distraction and Disruption at all costs has become our LIFE GOAL! So I’ve been “that” mother ignoring her berserk children. Luckily there is only one elderly gentleman waiting and he finds them amusing. Anyway—my apologies if this seems distracted!