Dear Friends,
Great excitement visited our breakfast table this morning, not because of what was in the children’s bowls, instead, it was the mess strewn garden that lay outside our kitchen window. The lawn had served as our local bear’s dining table and his grocery store was our trash bin. This was no surprise because during the night at 4.32am, I’d heard a loud bang. At first, I thought one of the children had fallen out of bed, but on investigation, the noise was caused by the crash of our wheely bin being toppled by our neighborhood bear.
However, my first look told me no harm was done, because the bin was closed and so I thought that the noise must have scared the bear away. And off to sleep I went until the dawn chorus blended with the babbling brook and the cool air through the open bedroom window. The quiet calm of breakfast was not to be, as you can imagine, when the children saw the mess.
Living close to wildlife is a thrill most of the time. Last week, our garden was visited by a good-sized milk snake as it basked in the spring sunshine, and you can understand the commotion that it caused. But sadly, its love of sunbathing caused it to have an untimely end on the road a few days later.
Just yesterday, I heard something scurrying in the roof-space of a shed, where a family of birds are being reared. Then there are bats in cavity or eves, carpenter bees all over the place, racoons under the shed and mice springing mousetraps in the garage. You know when that happens because of the smell.
And after all that, I wouldn’t change a thing, except to restock on mouse traps and discourage the bear disruption by securing the trash with a bungee cord or two.
When we complain about the wildlife, we need to remember God made them too and that they lived in the woods long before we moved in. We just need to adapt better and that’s up to us. In the meantime, I must finish sewing the wildflower seeds, and watch out for those butterflies and hummingbirds. Now, where did I put that bungee?
Pastor Cliff