You Can't Make This Shit Up

I wish I had photographed the apple tree when it was full of ripening golden delicious apples. It was going to be quite a harvest. I culled the bruised and rotting apples everyday and left them on the ground for the deer to eat. We were just days away from apple pies. But Thursday morning, Roger came in and said that maybe a deer had broken two big branches off the tree trying to get to the apples. So, I went out to see the damage. Whoa, two branches down, and ALL OF THE APPLES WERE GONE! That's when I knew it wasn't a deer at all. It had to be a bear. There were a lot of apples, and many were high in the tree. No way a deer could get up there, but a bear could. And that was that. No more apples. It was disappointing, especially since Roger had pruned that tree so beautifully in the early spring, and it was more productive than in the previous years. Oh well.

On Saturday, we took one of our usual walks. We call it the low-ditch trail. We head out past our neighbor's house and then down a dirt road, climb a little irrigation ditch fence, and walk along the ditch. The trail takes us up to "three horse meadow" and then up to the reservoir (that feeds the local ditches). On the dirt road we came upon a huge pile of scat. We thought it might be bear scat, so I photographed it as a kind of "confirmation" that bear have been out and about in our neighborhood. It had a bit of fur, and we assumed since bears are omnivores, that kind of made sense.

 

We moved on up the trail and came upon another huge pile of scat. This one was so different than the first pile, it made me question my first assumption that the first pile was bear scat. This second pile was so OBVIOUSLY bear scat. The size alone was enough to confirm it. It was interesting to note how much large scat was on the trail. We'd noticed some huge tracks on the dusty dirt road as well.

We hiked further up the trail and came upon another huge pile of bear scat. This one literally made us laugh out loud. It was full of our apples. We had been hoping to find a real sign that a bear or two had made off with our apples, and here it was. Such a fantastic confirmation. We loved it.

Of course we would have loved an apple pie even more! (Going out to photograph the forlorn tree bereft of apples, we found this one beauty remaining!)

And one final note, we're wondering if that first large pile of scat could be from a cougar. It is much bigger than any coyote scat we've ever seen. What do you think? The quarter in the photos is for perspective.