Have you ever woken to find your birdfeeders on the ground and wonder what happened in the night? We normally expect to have bears visit our neighborhood in the night or in late summer on their daytime patrols around garbage collection days, so I was caught unprepared for our Saturday morning visitor. She locked eyes with me as she crossed the street, setting a direct course toward the bluebird boxes in my yard. She was unresponsive to my loud protests and proceeded to pull down both boxes in her search for food. She then proceeded to clean out the nearby birdfeeders, sampling each one before climbing the tree to drink from the hummingbird feeder and defeat the “squirrel-proof” feeder. This seemingly very hungry and unafraid black bear is a mother of two cubs, left in a tree down the street. Once the food was exhausted, she returned to her cubs, leaving me to repair the boxes and birdfeeders. A lone baby bluebird was thrown from one box, while the house sparrows squatting in the other box appeared unscathed. I placed the baby bird in its nest and the adult bluebirds returned shortly thereafter. One lesson from this experience is that a hungry bear does not care about the time of day or the presence of people near their food source, so it may not be sufficient simply to pull our feeders in at night.
If you would like advice on what to do when you find baby birds out of their nests, please visit the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources website: dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/injured/birds for more information.
