We have an anti-sqirrel bird feeder nailed to a tree in our front yard. It looks much like this one. It sits about 6 feet off the ground. The feeder is basically mounted to the frame by way of two metal tabs that point up. This morning, the feeder had been brought down, but the frame part was still firmly nailed to the tree. OK - squirrels finally figured it out.
Wrong.
One tab was normal. The other tab was bent all the way down (180 degrees from original position). I’m a healthy 34 year old male and I couldn’t bend the tab back into shape. I couldn’t bend it at all. I needed a hammer. This was no boating accident. And no squirrel did this, either.
So it begs the question - what did this? Bear? Moose? Black capped chickadee on steroids? What animal with that kind of strength and height would go after song bird food? I didn’t notice any scratches or claw marks on the feeder. We live in rural Maine, and we do have bears and moose and all kinds of wild life out here.
Every 4-6 months a black bear goes through our nieghborhood tearing up every bird feeder around. I begin to suspect he’s on the payroll of the local birdfeeder merchant.
Seriously they love birdseed, suet, and all manner of tasty treats like that.
I’m Dutch. Any animal larger then a fox has been extinct in these parts for over two centuries. The biggest wildlife we get in suburban gardens are cat-sized.
Man, the idea of bears in the backyard is…exotic, that’s what it is. Cool. Dangerous.
Do you use birdseed with capsaicin? I know you can get that type to discourage squirrels, as the spicyness will irritate them, whereas birds are for some reason immune to it. That might deter bears also (although perhaps they’ll think it’s great, and just empty your birdbath afterwards).
So - it sounds like a bear is the most likely culprit. Great. Now getting into my car in the pre-dawn hours will be just that much more interesting.
Maastricht, that’s the beauty of living out here. We get deer in the yard and on the street all the time. One morning we had a moose in the backyard. Sometimes, when really big moose get scared, they destroy cars. :eek:
Nanoda, not that I’m aware of. If it seems that the bear is hanging around, that’ll be something to look into - thanks.
I have to agree. When we stayed with relatives who live just below Cheyenne Mountain, I found it extremely cool to hear the lady of the house bitching about the black bears breaking the branches in her fruit trees and the mountain lions scaring the dogs.
Then we went for a stroll one day and saw two adult black bears and a juvenile crossing the road, scrambling over a chain-link fence and strolling into the forest. Way cool, and very cute. If it had been a grizzly however, I would have probably have had hysterics, a fainting fit and explosive diaorrhea all at once, and don’t get me started on the invertebrates they have outside Europe :mad:
One more vote for bear. I watched a small black bear peel the lid off of a metal coleman cooler with no visible effort or strain. The locks and hinges popped, rivets came out, and the lid was bent in half. A grizzly can do the same to a car.
Even if a raccoon had enough strength to bend the tab, which I very much doubt - the OP indicated he needed a hammer to get it back into shape - it is difficult to imagine that a raccoon could get enough leverage while holding on to the tree.
I went out and took some pics. Here is the crime scene. Notice the squirrel. It is not happy, because it’s a squirrel proof feeder. Here is the inside of the mounting bracket. You can see the tabs there. The left tab was bent all the way down. I just tried to pull the right tab out with my fingers, and couldn’t. So it’s a pretty strong design. Here’s a bird who thinks he just died and went to heaven.
Anyway, I’ll bet that if I could somehow hold on, I could probably hang from this thing - it’s pretty sturdy.
That’s very unlikely around here. I basically live in the middle of the woods. Plus - I’ve never even seen a teenager around here.
I’m not saying it wasn’t a bear, but it’s probably a LOT easier to bend a tab by pulling on the attached bird feeder and grab the bare tab with your naked finger.
In my experience with these kinds of metal objects, it’s the holding the tab that’s the weak link, not the total force (which body mass will probably supply most of, rather than muscles.) As you said, you think you MIGHT be able to hang from it, but you KNOW you can’t hold on.
From what I can see (by no means definitive), it seems just possible that a big porcupine or raccoon might have enough weight to pull the thing down if it got onto it.
Given the difficulty in getting on to it by a non-acrobatic porcupine or semi-acrobatic raccoon (both much less acrobatic than a squirrel), I’m thinking bear is more likely, though.
:eek:
Here is the inside of the 
