Ideal summer weather continues and Friday night brought the first rainfall of the month. Shirt Lake remains at a high water stage, but has lost a vertical half-inch of water, primarily to evaporation since run-off is not possible at this stage. If flooding should occur, Shirt Lake would eventually drain through several other lakes, a river and finally to the Mississippi about ten miles north of here. This drainage would happen long before any properties were threatened.

This continues to be the summer of rashes for me and I now am fighting number four. The medication for Lyme disease caused a rather severe hives-type reaction and as it departed another reaction of the allergic type replaced it. I have no idea what is causing this. I hope it isn’t a return to the Lyme disease. The infrequency of my writing is explained by these troublesome eruptions.

One of the amazing things about August is the silence in the bird world. I still hear an occasional red-shouldered hawk, the blue heron still croaks loudly in the middle of the night and the loons are singing away the summer. But all those who filled the forest with morningsong and evensong the past few months, for the most part are silent. As I sit on the deck with morning coffee, the chickadees chatter when they come to feed, there is an occasional call of the oriole and, yesterday, even a short song. Once in a while the red eyed vireo sings but our thunderstorms and sunsets come with no help whatsoever from the robins. The hummingbirds that talk more with their wings than their mouth chatter as they fight over the feeder. And never mind that there are enough perches for all. Hummingbird code allows only one at the feeder at a time, no matter how many perches. And all the while sit silently and watch in the dense shadows of the trees. They’re all still there, plying the highways in the branches they know so well. Yet silent, waiting the next internal awakening that will send most of them away from here.

The black bear population in Minnesota is near or at an all-time high. One very large such creature meandered by our property a few days ago. Because of the intense development around the lake, bears usually avoid this area. Troublesome bears will break windows and tear down doors to get at food, especially if humans have fed them. It can be tempting to put out food for a young cub, but that may condemn him to death. With the population so high, there is no place to transport a dangerous bear where he will not remain a problem.

On the subject of black bears there is a wonderful bear story in the current issue of “The Trumpeter,” the publication of Wild and Free, a wild animal rescue organization based in Garrison Minnesota, www.wildandfree.org.

There are pictures at this site and you can also access it through the links on our site, www.blueberrypoint.com. Written by Vivian Clark, CVT, it tells of three bear cubs whose den was exposed last winter by a logger’s skid loader. The mother retreated to the edge of clearing and watched while the men took three two-pound cubs from the destroyed den. That was a mistake since the mother would have moved them to another den if left to her own devices.

The DNR brought the cubs to the Garrison Animal Hospital of DVM Deb Eskedahl, Wild and Free founder. This facility and its holding pens in the woods is one of the few places in Minnesota able to take orphaned bears. The bears easily fit in the palm of the hand at this time, but it didn’t take long before they were gaining ounces every day and taking eight ounces of milk every four hours. In order to preserve their wildness, handlers dressed in a “bear suit” of real bearskin and used plastic gloves to mask human odors. The bear’s sense of smell is one of the best in the animal kingdom.

As a result of a story on a Duluth/Superior TV Station, word came from the Wisconsin DNR that they had found two bear dens where one sow had a single cub, the other, two. Both animals were still in hibernation. The DNR noted that bears in that territory commonly cared for three or more cubs. The cubs now weighed eight pounds and had been on their four-hour feeding regimen for about a month. While it was hard for the handlers to “give up” the cubs, a non-voluntary adoption was successfully carried out and the cubs were welcomed with “furry arms.”

The same newsletter added interesting facts about bears. The bears can and do eat up to 25,192 forest tent caterpillars in a twenty-four hour period. Sounds like someone was counting. Black bears rarely kill humans and dogs kill 16 times as many annually as all bears (grizzly and polar too) combined. Contrary to popular belief, hibernating bears do awake to care for their newborn cubs, responding to every cry and keeping them warm, dry, clean and fed.

And finally, let it be recorded that Kristin Dix, wife of blueberrypoint.com's Webmaster, Alan, caught a 14.5 inch crappie last night. Translating that measurement on the DNR’s length to weight scale, we have a 2.5 pound crappie. A giant among his kind who usually weigh less than one pound and are considered very large at that size. This was truly a catch of a lifetime.