A Bear Family Moves Into the Yard - What to Do?

Cub in birch tree
photo from back porch

Two weeks ago, while playing backgammon after dinner, my husband noticed some dark movement through the window. “Bear!” he announced. He ran to the back window and I to the side. “Wow, it's a big one,” he observed. But through my window, I saw a cub. Oh-oh. One of the most dangerous combinations is a sow feeding and defending a cub, and in this case, she had three of them, each the size and bulk of a small sheepdog.

This black bear family was disconcerting for other reasons, too, namely the sow's seeming familiarity with cabins and her absolute fearlessness around us.

For example, we immediately started banging on the windows and shouting to discourage

Sow at kitchen window
"What - you want a piece of me?"

their presence. Undeterred, she climbed up onto our back porch, bumping our door in the process, stood up and looked in the window, eye level to me ( I am 5' 9"), with a look that I interpreted as, “What - you want a piece of me, punk?” Then, she deftly swiped a small plastic container off a shelf (in which I had the day's coffee grounds and egg shells intended for my garden) tossing it to the cubs who rummaged through the debris.

Bears are usually quiet, wary creatures.  A whole family in our yard, in daylight, is not a good sign. We wanted to encourage them to go elsewhere.  While they were distracted by the egg shells and coffee grounds next to the back porch, Bryan moved to the front door for a can of bear spray. We knew, from prior practice, that the spray reaches only about 20 feet – a closeness we did not intend to attempt, since bears can run 30 mph over short distances and moms can be especially prickly. Nonetheless, he sprayed, to saturate the air with the noxious fumes. The sound or scent caused the sow to turn and walk INTO the spray. When the pepper fumes irritated her eyes and nose, she

Two cubs climb spruce by outhouse

trotted away, giving an alert to the cubs who nimbly climbed the adjacent spruce trees for safety. In less than a minute, though, she turned around, walked THROUGH the spray, past Bryan, and toward our ducks, who were standing by the lake shore, squawking in alarm this whole time. They were able to glide off into the water to evade her, but alas, one of our hens had followed them, and was cowering behind some ferns. The bear spied her, dashed into the foliage and made off into the woods with her limp body clenched between sharp teeth. Two of the cubs followed into the alder thicket, but the third had found a duck's nest beneath a birch tree and was devouring the eggs. More willing to get close to a young one, I sprayed it with bear spray, so it ran off, too.

A Grizzly in the Garden; Bear Spray in the Cabin

Yesterday afternoon, I had an Alaskan experience that was 1/3 scary, 1/3 ridiculous, and 1/3 painful!

After the noisy, hot, sweaty work of weed whacking back by our power tower for more than an hour, I took a break with a big glass of ice tea and a book on the front porch, to cool down in the breeze wafting over the lake and enjoy the silence.  

In the woods to my right, a loud “crack” in the trees attracted my attention, so I looked into the upper reaches, thinking that perhaps a porcupine, which we have seen there before, had crawled out onto a weak branch.  Seeing no movement, I returned to my book.  

A minute later, I glanced right, riveted by the sight of a big, adult brown bear (grizzly) sniffing in my garden, 20 feet from the porch!  We have seen small black bears in the yard before (200 lbs), but the larger and more aggressive brown bears tend to “own” the nearby creeks, filled with salmon, grayling, and trout.  They cede the more limited appeals of our property – until now. Whether the bear was a boar or a sow, I don't know, but at close proximity, I could see that each of “his” padded feet was the size of a dinner plate, and the round head was as wide as a basketball hoop. He looked hale, hearty and big, more than twice as large as any black bear I had seen up close before.  What astonished me, given the size, was his stealthy silence. Had I not heard him break a branch in transit, and sensed movement in my peripheral vision, I would not have noticed his nearby presence at all.

How Do I Wash with No Running Water?

Without labor saving devices, routine chores take longer to do, and engender a great respect for such elements as sun, water, and wind.

Water is particularly precious and requires careful husbandry and judicious usage.

In the winter, we keep a 6 gallon pot on the wood stove all day (and night), filling it with snow throughout the day to melt and warm up enough to wash dishes, and occasionally, clothes, the floor, and ourselves. Humidifying the dry winter air is just a welcome addition.

Since snow melts to water in about a 10:1 ratio, depending on how dense the snow is, we bring in a five gallon bucket of snow almost every time we come in from outside. When the five gallon “bullet” of snow melts down to ½ gallon and warms up some, we can add another bucketful, and another after that. It takes about six buckets and several hours to get enough warmed melt water to do more than two tasks. I have become attuned to how little I need if I am careful: the minimums seems to be: a ½ gallon for a spit bath, 1 gallon to do the breakfast dishes, 2 gallons to do a small load of laundry. These are probably statistics that our ancestors knew, too.

Remote Cabins: Trash, Garbage, and Waste - Reuse, Re-purposing, Disposal Issues

Living off-grid means not only that we receive no electricity, but also no municipal services at all, including those for disposal of garbage, trash, sewage, and gray water. So we have become very intentional about what we buy, make, and use, because we have to figure out how to dispose of what remains. I welcome any additional clever ideas that readers may care to share.

Below are some examples of what we have done with wood ash, packaging, vegetable and meat leftovers (including bones), animal and human waste, and construction debris.  Some ideas may be useful even to urban readers.

Wood ash:

Alder wood fire

As a fertilizer, wood ash reads 0-1-3 and softens acidic soil, which is exactly what our property needs. Hard woods are higher in the desired nutrients than soft woods, according to the U of Oregon extension office. Do not use wood ash on potatoes or the related families of blueberries/azaleas/rhododendrons, which like acidic soil.

Vegetable waste:

• Kitchen and garden scraps can be fed to any of the animals (except citrus, potatoes, and onions) or trenched directly into gardens to enrich the soil. Some items work well in a compost tea or insect repellent. For example, sprays made from onion, red pepper, rhubarb, and tomato leaves repel many pests. Coffee and coffee grounds are best for acid loving plants. In fact, the Botanical Garden in Anchorage plants its potatoes in pots filled ONLY with coffee grounds scrounged from local coffee bars.  Banana and orange peels deter aphids, deliver potassium, phosphorous, and some nitrogen. Great around roses. Egg shells deliver calcium – particularly important to tomatoes and squash and the poultry themselves (pulverized) and they deter slugs (but are safe for red wigglers in vermiculture). In the winter, when we have fewer animals and frozen gardens, we keep red wigglers in the cabin in a worm farm and feed the excess vegetable matter to them. I have found that a compost pile doesn't work well for me here, so I just trench yard and kitchen scraps directly into gardens, particularly ones that are resting for a season. 
• Meat leftovers: All bones are made into soup stock, then offered to the poultry. After they have picked them clean, the bones are tossed into the wood stove to burn to ash for the gardens (0-12-0 nutrients). I cut up meat fat and chicken skin and feed it occasionally to our ducks and chickens both of which make their happiest discovery noises when they get those snacks. .

Raising Honey Bees in Alaska, Harvesting Honey

Every year, we add a few new projects, as we endeavor to increase our self-reliance. This year, in the arena of animal husbandry, we added ducks and honey bees. Since I have written in a prior article about the former, this article will focus on the latter.

Honey bees are absolutely the lowest maintenance creature we have raised, but obviously some special equipment and instruction are necessary first.

To get started, my husband enrolled, along with about 60 other people, in an informative, two part class in February, held in Eagle River, AK, and taught by Steve Victors (Alaska Wildflower Honey), a 20 year, local beekeeper and vendor of beekeeping supplies.

In addition to useful, Alaska-relevant considerations, Steve summarized the history of beekeeping (the Mayans and Egyptians both domesticated them), medical uses for wound management and mummification, and the fascinating culture of the hive, with its queen, workers, and drones. I wish I had attended, too!

After the class, Bryan was enthused and decided to go forward, so he bought a bee suit and

Astronaut or beekeeper? 

disassembled hive boxes. The suit looks like something an astronaut would wear, made of thick white cotton and nylon, with sturdy elastic around the ankles and wrists, and a double layered, framed net head dress. The boxes are made of white pine. Each hollow hive box is about 20” long x 16” wide. The depth of the boxes varies from 6 - 10”, depending on whether they are intended for housing bees (deeper) or storing honey (shallower). In the South, most bee hives I have seen are white, which is to keep them cool. But Alaskan beekeepers paint theirs dark colors, to keep them warm. Ours are forest green, to match our various outbuildings.

The green honey boxes are shallower
than the unpainted brood box below