The Bear Who Took Our Trash

This is not our Bear, this one lives in Roscoe, next village

We named the place Black Bear Cottage for a reason. We just didn't expect the namesake to show up so literally.

It happened on a quiet Sunday evening, the kind of evening where you've cleaned up after the weekend's guests, taken the trash bag out to the side of the house, and gone back inside to make a cup of tea before the drive home. Twenty minutes later, we glanced out the window and saw — well, we saw nothing, at first. The trash bag was gone. Where the bag had been, there was a single banana peel and a long, deliberate trail of debris leading down the lawn and into the trees.

A coffee filter. A yogurt container. A heel of bread.

It was, unmistakably, the work of a bear.

We grabbed flashlights and a roll of trash bags and followed the trail. About fifty yards into the woods, we found him — or rather, we found his back, because he was hunched over the bag with the kind of focused enthusiasm normally reserved for children opening presents. He looked up. We looked at him. There was a long, awkward pause in which we all silently agreed that this was, technically, his trash now.

We did get most of it back, eventually. Not by chasing him exactly — chasing a bear is not a recommended life strategy — but by giving him a wide berth, making some respectful noise, and waiting until he ambled off into the deeper woods with what was clearly the most interesting find of the evening (a takeout container, if you must know). We spent the next hour picking coffee grounds out of the ferns by flashlight.

Here's what we learned.

Black bears live in the Catskills. They're not aggressive, they're not interested in people, and in years of running this cottage we've had exactly one bear incident, which was the one we just described. They are, however, extremely interested in food — specifically, the food in your trash. So the rule at Black Bear Cottage is now simple and we ask all guests to follow it: trash stays inside until the morning of pickup, and food scraps go in the sealed bin under the kitchen sink, never out on the deck.

Do that, and you'll likely never see a bear during your stay. You might hear an owl. You'll definitely see deer. The fireflies will show up in July and the rabbits will come out at dusk. The bears mostly keep to themselves, which is what we want, and what they want, and frankly what works best for everyone.

But every now and then, on a quiet Sunday evening, one of them remembers we're here. And honestly? We don't really mind. We named the place after them. It would be strange if they never visited at all.