HappyDay: The Year of the Bear
Casey O’Neill is a cannabis and food farmer in Mendocino County who has been writing newsletters about his efforts to provide sustainable produce and marijuana. We feature his column once a week.
This is the year of the bear. Everyone I talk to no matter which neighborwood they live in has had difficulties with bears. It’s a poor manzanita berry year, so there is less for them to eat, and the acorn crop is on an off year after last year’s heavy mast production. The bears are hungry, and it seems like their population numbers are up.
Two weeks ago we had a bear attack at the ranch that cost us 23 out of 25 pullets that were just about to start laying eggs, along with 2 turkeys that were at market weight and due for slaughter that coming week. The bear smashed the hog panel chicken tractor and peeled the hog panel door down as though it were nothing, killing almost all of the birds but not really eating more than a bite here and there.
I had planned to move the young birds to the main coop, but ran out of oomph on Friday night (we move birds at night so they go to sleep in one place and wake up in the coop where we want them to be). On Saturday night the bear came and cost us several months of work and the feed required to raise the young pullets, setting back our egg laying operation for the winter.
In the time since his visit, I’ve thought a great deal about bears, about predators, about living in interaction with wildlife. I’ve always been against the killing of predators, believing that it’s important for me as a livestock owner to do the work to keep my animals safe. I’ve gone through the full range of emotions, from feeling like we should get a depredation permit from the Department of Fish and Wildlife so we can kill the bear, to feeling like I should quit raising animals. It’s hard to feel helpless, yet also hard to consider killing an apex predator for doing what it does.
After conversations with biologists at DFW, it seems like if we were going to take a bear, the best way to do it would be to get tags for hunting it so that we could eat it rather than have to leave the carcass for inspection under the auspices of a depredation permit. That said, after much discussion and soul-searching, we have decided against shooting a bear and have been taking turns camping at the ranch with a spotlight and listening for when our livestock guardian dog begins to bark.
We’ve also been working on setting up more vigorous electric fencing including two strands of super hot perimeter fencing in addition to the individual poultry netting and sheep netting enclosing each set of animals. We’ve deployed all of our chargers, so that the meat birds are in one enclosure, sheep in another, and laying hens in a third, with Booboo the livestock dog having the ability to patrol around all three. The pigs are in a hard panel enclosure on the edge of the pasture in the center of the ranch, and Booboo has access to one side of that area.
Losing animals is one of the unfortunate rites of passage to raising livestock, but it’s also a lesson on my own failings and the things I need to do better as a farmer/rancher. The sting of the teaching is real, weighing on me as I think about the loss of life, the monetary cost, but also the heartbreak of climate change, hungry populations of animals and the changing world in which we live.
In an incursion to our small orchard at Pops’, the bear ripped down a French prune plum tree that Amber grafted and we planted 10 years ago. It had a gorgeous crop of fruit on it this year and was one of our more productive trees. Now it’s little more than a splintered stump, and the loss hurts worse than that of the livestock because I can raise more chickens in just a few months, but it will take me 10 years to grow another tree. There is something about the shattering of an image of permanence in the loss of the plum that shakes me, leaving me reflecting sadly about the work required to maintain and adapt.
Despite the difficulties, I find myself renewed in the challenge and grateful for the abundance of the many other harvests from the farm. Working together with family to strengthen and expand our electric fencing reminds me of the joy of shared effort and our ability to overcome adversity. These are the inevitable struggles of farming, and I’m striving to learn to take them in stride. As always, much love and great success to you in your journey!
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I don’t know if this will help, my wife’s uncle used to be a camp host at various state parks and claimed when he had a persistent bear visit the camp he used rock salt in his shotgun to their hindquarters and they never returned.
The acorns in trinity are bigger then I have ever seen and a falling already
Hey Booboo, where’s them pic-a-nic baskets?
Maybe a second, bigger dog? No one wants an injured dog (or a vet bill), but a komondor or a big sheepdog (Pyrenees or Anatolian) could team up with Booboo and make a bear think twice about whether or not to fuck around and find out.
Remembering Scott Graves, brings memories of bear activities. I couldn’t imagine a bear attack happening to me.