Post Scripts: Unpleasant wildlife neighbors

All of us at one time or another have heard stories of unpleasant neighbors. They might be noisy, they might have junk cars in their front yard or some even bite! As second home communities push deeper into rural areas, wild animals are feeling the squeeze.
Add to that, droughts and fire that further restrict habitat, easy pickings from garbage cans and animal populations that seem to be exploding, its easy to see why more people are coming into contact with wildlife. Generally speaking, wildlife problems are property problems, not safety problems. In fact, the greatest wildlife-related safety problem is the 1.5 million deer-vehicle collisions that occur each year, a few of these in Daviess County.
Next in line of deer complaints have to do with damage to landscaping. The best solution for that is an apartment in the city.
Serious property damage is mushrooming with the estimated 900,000 black bears that live in North America, from those who overturn garbage cans in New Jersey to the ones that destroy barbeque grills in camps and parks.
They can be dangerous: 23 people have been killed by bears in Canada and the U.S. since 2000, according to National Park Service reports.
Richard Carlson of Tucson, Ariz., has a theory about bears: humans are training them to break into vacation homes. He and his wife have a fine vacation home Tahoe City, Calif., where black bears have been a problem for years. At one time they had “garbage palaces” – wooden structures that hold two garbage cans that make them inaccessible to raccoons and coyotes.
Then the bears showed up and discovered they could destroy the palaces so in the 1990s they switched to metal garbage palaces which the bears could not enter. So the bears looked around and found bigger wooden boxes – houses!
Shortly before Christmas in 2007, a family wanted an appraisal of their vacation home. The appraiser went to their house and then called in the bad news. A bear had broken the door in half and had taken red ketchup, mustard and the blue gel from ice packs and done an abstract design on their white carpet. It also tore off half the cabinet doors.
There was no mystery about the invader: it was the neighborhood bear that had hit about 30 homes. Insurance paid for repairs and cleaning.
Bears can be a problem even with toothier fauna. In swampier areas in Florida, like Alligator Point, its spring-fed streams, its fishing, bird watching and boating, there are alligators – but a bigger problem are the bears who tear the bottoms out of garbage cans to eat left-over food. A real estate agent was asked by a visitor if the alligators were a problem.
“No, it’s the bears who tear the bottoms out of garbage cans.”
There are alligators to deal with every day in Florida. However, the last death from an alligator was in 1987 when a swimmer in a state park was killed by an 11-foot-long alligator. I’ve witnessed horrible deaths in two major wars but I never want to see another alligator anytime, anywhere.