Yikes! Take down your bird feeders, lock up the garbage cans! And keep your doors closed & locked! No more interior visits I hope.

I saw on the local news app here that someone posted a video of a bear strolling down the sidewalk outside an apartment building in Tysons Corner, here in Virginia. Right in the middle of a city.

And I discovered through a bit of research that the black bear doesn't so much hibernate as become lethargic and just bed down. Females usually are in a den by the end of November but males don't stop roaming until the end of December !! Apparently they have 'man stuff' to do to insure a productive spring !

Consider making a rug. My sister was trying to tell my little nephew where we were going to have Christmas dinner once, and finally he said, "Oh! the house with the flat bear."

Carolyn....oh that is funny. Those bears rugs always freaked me out.......I suspect they still would !

Yoyo, that would make me nervous as heck about taking a stroll through my neighborhood!

I purchased a small bear horn just for that purpose. Of course it would probably freak out the neighbors as much as a bear but c'est la vie !!

They are definitely fearless and still wandering about. We were in the kitchen last week and were surprised when a sizable bear just casually strolled past the bay window. We scrambled for photos but didn't manage to get anything decent and he wandered away through our backyard. The dog had a good sniff around afterward and we could tell he was a little freaked out. It's been fairly warm, so I don't imagine they're in any rush to bed down for the winter. Be careful out there!

Here's a thing Yoyo. I had mentioned in your first 'bear post' that I had only once seen a bear while visiting with friends in Banff Alberta and while on an early evening walk we had seen a bear on the far side of the track sniffing around the garbage outside a group of cabins.

By coincidence one of those friends phoned me the other day from Toronto and brought up the 'bear' subject.

She said "Do you remember that huge bear that suddenly appeared behind us, standing on its hind legs, front paws outstretched and growling. And you screamed in fright and grabbed my arm?

i said I remembered seeing the bear over the road and keeping very still while it ambled off, and asked what did we do after it confronted us. Friend said she couldn't remember! I wonder it we had all lost consciousness due to fright or the bear and got bored and moved on to tastier morsels . . . but isn't it strange how two stories can differ in so many aspects? At least the bear part was correct.

I agree with the difference in stories when people were at the same event.

I once had to correct my D who said she was at a lunch with her D to meet some of my i'net friends. I checked and found my memory was correct that she wasn't there at all!

Her D had described it so well that she thought she had attended!

I am being visited by the bobtail goannas as the weather is getting warm. They don't usually come indoors, just like to laze on the back area paving absorbing the heat.

Critters in residence.........ugh.

A person I was talking with recently related this story :

A family has just moved into a new home ( older but new to them) that they'd saved for years to buy.

One morning their little one, while sitting on the toilet, felt something "tickle" her bum.

Standing up she discovered a snake in the toilet !!!!!!!!!!!

( I need a moment here to scream my head off and pry my toes from the permanently curled position)

Horrified, they call an exterminator who immediately took the cover off their septic tank in the yard and found that it was filled with a gadzillion writhing snakes !!!!

UGH! Unfortunately, I can't unread that snake story.

Kathy, not to gild the lily here but......you know , the sewer system pipes in a home do not fill up entirely, and snakes swim....well, swimmingly.

So they can pop up anywhere those waste pipes are located, such as the kitchen sink, the laundry sink, the vanity sink , the bath tub drain, the shower floor drain, toilets, bidets, any floor drain down in the basement......you get the picture . EGADS!!!!!!

I would probably , most likely , definitely never be able to live in that house. Period.

Yoyobon - Stop it!

I suspect, but certainly couldn't confirm, that it's a rural legend and not true at all.

Lacey.....it is true, verified. I personally know two people who have had snakes in pipes issues for this reason.

Not an uncommon thing to happen in Australia either. Also the poisonous redback spider likes to hide under the seat in outdoor dunnies (lavatories) which is why, although I am not likely to have this problem in my urban home, I check the facilities before sitting down!

Years ago I moved my young son's bed for cleaning by pulling on the back of the bedhead and touched something furry which dropped and scuttled off. I told him that there had been a Huntsman spider hiding in the frame.

"Oh. yes," he said casually "I keep a couple of them as pets there!" How could he sleep? I can't rest with any known insect in my bedroom.

Australian Huntsman spiders belong to the Family Sparassidae (formerly Heteropodidae) and are famed as being the hairy so-called 'tarantulas' on house walls that terrify people by scuttling out from behind curtains.

Check out "Australian Drop Bear" for a laugh.

For your viewing pleasure....the Drop Bear ( aka my worst "cat nightmare' )

Charming little fella! I hope you protected yourself with a smear of Vegemite behind your ears before you Googled him!