Skip to main content

Lions, (no Tigers) and Bears, Oh my



We came home from a weekend at Steamboat Springs yesterday. It seems the bears had a picnic under the pine tree in our front yard. My neighbor snapped this pic of the diners before they came to our house (restaurant?) . There were hamburger wrappers, napkins, and paper cups with straws all around. I didn't know bears used straws. They even left their own 'calling cards' in the lawn and driveway.  We have had a momma bear and 2 cubs in the neighborhood for about 3 weeks now. 
Yes they are wild and yes they (she) is potentially dangerous, but not nearly as frightening as this visitor we had about 15 years ago.
That's our house on the other side of the fence. At the time, our other neighbor had some ceramic deer statues in his yard and the lion decided to investigate.












Labels:

Comments

  1. Far Side of FiftySeptember 23, 2019 at 9:44 PM

    Scary visitor! We had a bear visit last year not yet this year. I bet you had a fun time away!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A Percussionist's NotebookSeptember 24, 2019 at 8:11 AM

      Thank you for the visit. Sadly last night we found out that the momma bear was put down by the Wildlife Dept. The cubs were tranquilized and removed.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Amadinda

  The Amadinda is an African xylophone originally made from slabs of wood or even large sticks, with or without gourds for resonators. There was no reason for this project other than to see if I could make a simple mallet instrument. The box was made from plywood (which also acted as the resonators) and the bars were made from maple.  Since this was to be a true xylophone, the bars were all of equal width. Tuning was done by cutting the bars to different lengths and removing material from the bottom. Using a router I created a sort of 'stepped pyramid' instead of the traditional arc cut found on marimba or xylophone bars.  Cutting the underside is not only for tuning but it focuses the pitch and creates the characteristic overtones of the instrument. Since I wanted to play this with other 'Western' instruments, I chose to use a pentatonic scale of 2 2/5 octaves (C#,D#,F#,G#,A#,C#,D#,F#,G#,A#,C#,D#). Two people sit on either side of the instrument and strike the ends of ...
3 comments
Read more

Tambourine Shell Repair

A broken tambourine shell usually means that a new tambourine purchase is necessary. This can be exciting: I like getting new instruments, or sad: Any instrument that is damaged is a terrible thing. All tambourine shells can break, from my famous $14 variety to top of the line brands like Grover and Black Swamp. It's easy to replace a tambourine head but broken shells/missing pins and jingles usually means an early grave for the instrument. My early attempts at these repairs were stopgap measures until a new one was found. Wood or 'super' glue used on the shell turned out to be poor choices. It wasn't until last year that I really focused on shell repair. It happened during a Canyon Winds rehearsal when one of our tambourines exploded, pins and jingles were flying everywhere. Yep, it was the Resident Gorilla playing it. The shell had cracked between three sets of jingles near the head of the tambourine. We eventually replaced this with a Black Swamp tambourine but I s...
2 comments
Read more

Bandelier National Monument

 One of our very special places is Bandelier National Monument. We backpacked here for the first time in 1974 and returned nearly every year into the late 80's. As I mentioned before, we celebrated our 50th anniversary with a trip to the area in 2019. We also celebrated our 24th one there during one of our backpacking trips. We were joined by another couple during this 7 day trip. I had packed a small bottle of champagne, a checkered table cloth, and a candle (which was not lit because of fire danger).  The guest list included our friends and one passerby. One of the places we visited in the back country was called 'Shrine of the Stone Lions'. Two large boulders in the shape of mountain lions lying together front paws outstretched. A 20 foot circle of upright boulders surrounding them. We had visited this shrine many times on our trips and each time there were always many religious offerings: antlers, feathers, personal items. After so many hundreds of years it was nice to ...
2 comments
Read more