The Crayfish and the Bear (unusual visitors to our yard)

July has been an interesting month, to say the least! I planned to sit down yesterday to do this post to share a couple of unusual visitors who stopped by over the past few weeks & helped make things interesting (the aforementioned crayfish & the bear), since it also happened to be my birthday (fifty-six, for those inquiring minds) and I figured I'd have plenty of free time to get it done.

Wrong about the free time, but for an awesome reason. My husband has been wanting to get me a new laptop for months, and I've been telling him that if he spent money we don't have on something I really don't need, I'd be really mad. Granted, the one I've been using is a 2009-ish third hand one that we bought new for our youngest, who passed it down to me when we got her a new one in 2018. But since I also have a desktop computer (new in 2016, so also a bit long in the tooth), and the laptop worked most of the time, it didn't seem necessary to me.

After he made me a sort of Eggs Benedict for breakfast (toast instead of English muffins, diced ham steak instead of Canadian bacon, since that's what we had on hand), he told me to close my eyes and hold out my hands. Next thing I knew, I had a new-to-me, lightly used laptop (also from 2018) he got from FB marketplace for me the night before. His defense? "It's not technically new." 😂

So needless to say, I spent many hours with him getting things set up, transferred, and all the things that you think will be quick, but take hours to get done. But now I'm writing this post on it, while sitting outside with hubby as he grills my belated birthday dinner (postponed due to yet another round of torrential rain & thunder boomers all day long yesterday).

As for these photos, the ones of the crayfish were taken in my Durham, NH yard with my Nikon, and the pictures & video of the bear were taken from my husband's doorbell cameras (yes, that's not a typo, he has two up at the moment because he's comparing how two different models of the Wyze cameras work). Then all were resized and cleaned up a bit with PicMonkey, mostly tweaking the exposure and sharpness.

The Crayfish and the Bear

First, the Crayfish

On July 9th, I took our dog Sandy out for his evening constitutional around 9pm-ish. While the sun had gone down about an hour before, it was still light enough to see relatively well. As we were strolling down the yard, I noticed something small moving in the grass next to our landlady's rhubarb patch. My first thought was a mouse, but the movement was definitely not mouse-like. I then recognized the motion, but my brain immediately cramped, because while I'd seen many of them in my hometown of Gloucester (a fishing town), I'd never come across one in our surrounded-by-woods-with-no-bodies-of-water-in-sight yard.

The Crayfish and the Bear
1. The living room window was open, so I yelled to my husband to grab my Nikon & to come confirm I wasn't crazy. Well, at least not about the thing crawling slowly through the grass...

2. Yep, it was a crayfish! We both kind of stood there for a moment, trying to wrap our brains around what we were seeing (because his was hurting as much as mine), and watched as it slowly moved through the grass towards the woods.

The Crayfish and the Bear
3. It had been raining off and on most of the day, as the tail end of Tropical Storm Elsa moved over us, and it got a bit intense a few times, but I didn't think it was intense enough to rain crayfish.

4. Turns out I wasn't the only one in New Hampshire this month to find a random crayfish in her yard - a woman in Center Barnstead (little over 25 miles from us) also found one in her yard on July 2nd, also after a storm.

The Crayfish and the Bear
5. My husband put his foot near the crayfish, to give a better sense of its size, and the crayfish (which until then had been relatively chill) whipped around and we heard clicking noises as it started snapping its claws in his general direction. We decided it was time to leave it be, and it backed away from where it was in this shot to under the rhubarb leaves, and that's the last we saw of it.

Then, the Bear

A few days ago (the 27th, to be exact) my husband and I were heading out to do a few errands around 5:30pm. I stepped out on the porch first, and movement by a car in our landlady's driveway caught my eye. For about a second, I wondered what kind of of dog it was, when it looked at me and I realized - it wasn't a dog, it was a young (I think) bear!

Needless to say, taking pictures wasn't the first thing on our minds and we skedaddled pretty quick back into the house. Then my husband figured he'd try to get at least one shot of it, in case someone like Fish & Games wanted to check it out, so he stepped back onto the porch just as it was disappearing back into the woods.

As luck would have it though, the aforementioned cameras were able to catch a goodly bit of the encounter. One video is about a minute and a half long, and if you watch the spot between the garage and the front of the white car, you can see where the bear arrived and went into the garage, then at about the one minute mark, it comes out just as we stepped out. There's no audio on that one, as it was screechy & garbled, so I stripped it out.

Remember, watch the spot in front of the white car in front of the grey garage...

This one is much shorter, and only shows from the moment we step out, and it kind of glitches for a few seconds. However, I figured I'd include it because it does have audio, so you get to hear me saying, "oh my god, oh my god." Which, truth be told, I'm rather surprised since I fully expected I would've dropped a few f-bombs instead. 😂

The Crayfish and the Bear
8. And a few still shots from the video (complete with green squares that mark where the motion was - the moment we looked into each other's eyes (and yes, I know there was a fair bit of distance between us, but in the moment he seemed so much closer.

9. Yes, my first instinct was to put my arm out to stop my husband, because he needed me to protect him...lol

The Crayfish and the Bear
10. Mr Bear moseying on back into the woods.

11. A zoomed in and cropped version - I couldn't get it much clearer than this, but I figured it gives a good idea of the size of the bear. And again, we weren't alone in spotting him - there have been many reports of bears roaming in our neighborhood as of late, but this is the first time, I think since our landlords bought this property 30 some odd years ago, that one was on seen near the houses, let alone leaving wet footprints in their garage!

Hope you enjoyed seeing what I was able to capture of our unusual visitors, the crayfish and the bear!

Thanks for stopping by!

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