Our Backyard Visitors

September 24th (Thursday)

Our back yard smells amazing because of the constant fragrance from our yellow cedar wafting out of our woodshed, and we have five Stellar Jays that come and ask for food.  Sometimes one of them will come and sit on our windowsill looking at us and tapping on the glass asking for food.  Other times they will sit on our deck and squawk to get our attention.  One of them is super friendly and will even hop right up and take food from our hands, the other four are more timid, but they all stop by to say, “Hi”.

We were also paid a visit by a large black bear that decided to come up onto our back deck to get out of the rain.  We had no idea that it was there until Jason saw it out of the back door window.  When Jason yelled at it, it looked up, looked at us, and then slowly lumbered its way out onto the outer part of our deck, out into the rain.  I worried that it may feel trapped, since the doorway to the stairs down off of the deck was closed, but it simply climbed its way up onto the top of our railing.  It stood there for a bit, and then slowly turned around and looked at us through the window.  It was quite a large bear, and it looked funny with its large round body standing with all of its feet down on one little spot on the 2x6 railing of our deck.  It looked like an old picture of a circus bear standing on a ball.  Then the bear proceeded to climb its way down the outside of the corner post of our railing, and slowly wandered out of our yard.  

We have learned that we need to look out the window onto the deck before simply walking out.  It was super neat to see the bear so close and it looked very cute, but things would have been very different had we walked out onto its lap.