Bear visit

Day before yesterday, I was casually walking in the orchard, looking at the trees I still hadn't harvested and evaluating how much work I still had to do...
Since I wasn't looking much at the ground level, I suddently noticed I almost walked on a "beautiful" mass of what looks like apple sauce with chunks of apples - Oh, the bear came by... It's probably the same one I saw 2 weeks ago, a big guy...

Then looking closer at the trees, all the truncks of those that hadn't yet been harvested were deeply scarred - the bear had climbed. Also a number of broken branches in the top of the trees.
I took a few pictures, see the album:
[goo.gl]

Fortunately, these are big Cortland trees, they are big enough to handle it, and as we say in French "Ils ont vu neiger" they have seen snow before... Just thinking of what such an animal would have done to a small dwarf or semi dwarf tree - probably would have meant "kiss him goodbye".
Just another case of "Standard tree is better"...

In any case, this has triggered a franatic afternoon to harvest in rush the remaining apples, so that the bear wouldn't want to harm the trees any further!
Claude

Jolicoeur Orchard
Zone 4 in Quebec
Author, The New Cider Maker's Handbook

We also had a bear visitor who got over the fence by shorting out the hot wire. Our trees are young so lots of apples within easy reach. Very little tree damage but really disgusting to accidentally step in those chunky apple scat piles left all over the orchard! I'm guessing we lost at least 1/2 bin, 400 +/- lbs Hot wire fixes, problem solved.

Vista Ridge Orchard
Zone 8a in Washington
235 Cider and heritage apple trees, 72 varieties,