Learn how you can prevent unwanted visitors—of all kinds—in your aviary.

By Janelle M. Crandell

We don’t have many visitors here at the Avitech aviary. Located in a mountain range about 60 miles north of Los Angeles, our facility is nestled in the pine woods 6,000 feet up on the north side of Frazier Mountain. Our nearest neighbor is about half a mile away, and our aviary is closed to the public. So we’re usually surprised and glad to have a visitor at Avitech, but one night last summer we got a lot more surprise than we’d bargained for.

Our aviary building is on the lot below our house and is connected by a stairway. We built it aviary of steel-reinforced concrete using foam blocks, which create heavily insulated l0-inch-thick walls that keep heat and cold out and sound in. The top floor of the building houses the brooder and feeding area for babies and a juvenile room for weaning birds, as well as our office and storerooms. The breeding birds are kept on the first floor, which is divided into two bird rooms, a cleanup room and a food storage room. The building is actually built into the side of a hill so the east side of the first story is underground. While this construction helps maintain a constant temperature, we were concerned about light and air, so we had large windows installed on the west walls and the front door.

One hot August night, we were fast asleep at about 2 AM when our dog woke us with frantic barking. The dog had only been with us for about a month, and since we didn’t hear or see anything, we though it was just nervous or had a bad dream. We stayed in bed and tried to calm our dog down, but it would have none of that. It jumped up on the bed and pulled my husband Ed by the sleeve of his pajamas. This convinced Ed that at least a cursory investigation was necessary. He went downstairs, checked the front and rear of the house and turned on the yard lights. At this point, I joined him downstairs and we went out onto a deck that overlooks the aviary building to listen for sounds. Since the aviary windows are on the other side of the building, there is not much sound from the birds at the house (we planned it that way!) so we leaned over the deck rail and strained to hear.

It was 2 AM but we could faintly hear that our orange wings were screeching, the Pionus were in an uproar, and the double yellowheads and napes sounded like they were screaming for help. A sharp pain of terror struck my heart. The birds would not be up at this time of night—our lights are on a timer, and they’d been off since 8 PM. My husband wheeled around and said, “Someone’s broken into the aviary, let’s go.”

We ran through the house and down the stairway to the aviary. I foolishly gave little thought to what action we would take if we confronted someone down there. My entire focus was on not letting them get any of my birds, no matter what it took. We ran around to the front deck of the aviary and leaned over to look at the windows along the west wall. The moon was not full, but there was enough light to see the windows and the ground clearly. I half expected to see the perpetrator climbing out of the window with a sack of birds. Instead we watched in stark horror as a large nest box flew out of the window. A second later, a sheet metal divider that had been bolted to a flight came crashing out. “Oh my God,” I thought, “They’re wrecking the place!” The same thought struck Ed as we dashed off down to the bird rooms.

We had no guns or weapons of any kind. As we ran through the storage area, Ed grabbed a janitor’s broom, and I selected an extra large concrete perch like the ones that we put into breeders cages to keep their nails smooth. I figured that if I got a shot at this guy he wouldn’t get up again after being conked on the head with this chunk of reinforced concrete.

Face to Face With the Intruder

I fully expected to see a shocking scene of carnage in the bird room, but I was not prepared for what greeted us as we swung the door open. Flights were pushed around at odd angles, and some were overturned. Dividers and nest boxes littered the floor. And there, standing between the flights on the far side of the room with birds flying past his head, was the largest black bear I had ever seen!

One of my worst fears had just become a reality. I’d heard about a neighbor several years ago who lost his parrot to a bear in a gruesome house break-in and I’d always feared that one might break into our aviary. We’d built a strong building with steel doors, but my husband had not put the steel bear bars that I wanted on the windows. He thought that bars on the windows would make the building look like a prison.

The bear was as black as coal, and its head was huge. The bear had round protruding ears, a shiny snout and long yellow teeth that made it look like a character out of a horror movie. I think we caught the bear in the act of trying to take a cage apart. It was standing up and looking straight at us with an expression that seemed to say, “What are you guys doing here?”

In hopes of scaring the bear into leaving the room, we screamed and yelled at the top of our lungs. It just stood and stared. Ed jumped forward and hit the bear on the nose with his broom. The bear made no sound. It just looked at Ed and waved a paw in the air. That’s when I noticed its really long, hooked claws and wondered how many of my birds had been devoured by this beast. I also noticed the smell. The entire room was filled with a vile smell that my husband later described as worse than death. Ed hit the bear again and it shook its head as though it were waking from a dream. Hit a third time, the bear issued a few grunts. Then it turned around, and hoisted itself out of the window.

Gone—For Now

What sweet relief! The bear was gone and now we could take stock and tend to our birds. I called our friends Rick and Karen and asked them to bring a gun in case the bear returned. The place was a mess, with feathers everywhere and spots of blood splattered on the walls and floor. One of our blue front males came flying out of the African greys’ room, and several of the bronze wings were cowering under a cage.

We did a quick survey and discovered no major injuries except for broken feathers. We rounded up the flying birds, righted the flights and then discovered that our green-cheeked conures (Beeps and Squeaks) were missing. We searched everywhere and had finally decided that they’d flown out of the window into the dark or had been eaten by the bear when we heard a familiar peep from the back corner of the room.

There was the green cheek’s nest box lying on its side with Squeaks’ head sticking out of the hole. We rushed over and found that Beeps was also in the nest box. The pair had jumped into the box when the bear attacked. Then they’d hung on while the bear tore the box off the cage and tossed it into the corner. And here they were, safe and sound, not a feather out of place.

We then checked the other room where our African birds are kept and were startled to find that our red bellies’ cage had been squashed to a height of about 6 inches. The red bellies were crouched down inside but appeared to be okay. The cage was so badly damaged that we had to cut it open to get the birds out. From the relatively good condition of the room and the tuffs of hair stuck on the wall near the window and on the wrecked cage, we guessed that the bear entered through the window in this room first.

The bear probably stepped from the window onto the red bellies’ cage and fell to the floor when the cage collapsed under its weight. The fall startled the bear, and it jumped back out the window. At this point, it seems that hunger overcame fear and the bear reentered through the next window.

We spent the rest of night in the aviary making temporary repairs, smoothing ruffled feathers and generally keeping a lookout for the return of our visitor. At dawn, we went outside for a closer look at the scene. The windows had been pulled out of their frames and thrown on the ground. Several dividers and nest boxes were outside. The windows did not offer easy access and the bear had left numerous claw marks on the siding and sills as he climbed up and hoisted himself in. The most curious marks were at the front door. The windows in the front door are small and at least 5 or 6 feet high. There were paw marks running up the door to the windows where the bear had apparently pulled itself up to look in. It seemed strange to me that a wild animal could grasp the concept of looking through a window.

On the inside, the walls and window sills had numerous deep gouges as the bear had clawed its way around while stumbling through the aviary. There were also strange blobs of smelly gunk and patches of hair pasted to the walls. After repairing the damaged flights and replacing nest boxes, we scrubbed the rooms down with disinfectant and patched the drywall. We replaced the windows, and our friend Rick welded and attached steel bars on the inside. Later in the day, we called the Fish and Game department and related our experience.

The Search Begins

A state game warden and the government trapper, Joe, came out and accessed the situation. Joe had brought a large culvert trap built on a trailer that he pulled behind his pickup truck. The culvert was about 4 or 5 feet wide and about 20 feet long. It had a heavy steel trap door at the rear attached to a bait lever inside near the front. Joe explained that the bear would climb in to get the bait, and the door would swing shut and latch. Then he would just drive away the next day with the bear inside. “How simple,” I thought.

Joe backed the trap up to the front door of the aviary and unhitched the trailer. Then he pulled a foul smelling bag of chicken parts out of the bed of the truck, dumped some of it out along the ground leading to the trap door and hung the bag up inside the culvert. He also produced a large can of fish and threw the contents into the culvert. He set the door latch, walked to the opposite end of the culvert and poked the bait lever with a stick through the bars at the front of the culvert. The door slammed shut with a reassuring clang.

From the size of the tracks, Joe believed that the bear was a male of about 300 pounds. Both the trapper and the warden were disturbed by the boldness of this bear, particularly when I told them that my husband had to hit the bear three times with a broom handle before it responded. They were also interested in the paw prints on the front door and said that a bear that was this familiar and comfortable with buildings and people could be a safety hazard to the community. I could certainly attest to that!

Joe examined our steel bars and asked how they were attached. He explained that a bear could have the strength of 20 men and could easily pull the bars out if it wanted to get inside. That was certainly not what I wanted to hear at that moment. I was nervous about having the trap so close to the building, and I asked if the bear might prefer the aviary to the trap. Joe laughed. “I’ve never had a bear fail to crawl into this trap,” he said. “It smells just like a garbage dumpster, and that is dinner time to a bear.”

Joe thought that the bear would return that night to get the goodies it had missed and crawl right into the trap. He said he’d be back tomorrow to take the bear away.

Being Prepared

With due respect to the professional animal people, we still felt that the bear might prefer to crawl into the aviary. So, my husband called our friend Brent, who is an avid hunter, and explained the situation.

Brent was also fairly certain that the bear would return that night, but he wasn’t as sure as Joe had been that the bear would casually crawl into the trap instead of the aviary.

So Brent volunteered to come over and help out. Ed borrowed the old military rifle that Rick had brought over the night before, and Brent came with a rifle, a shotgun and a large pistol. The men, literally “loaded for bear,” camped out in the office at the aviary building all night and waited. But the bear didn’t come that night.

Realizing that we couldn’t stay awake every night, Ed decided to rig up a bear alarm. He mounted a motion detector used to turn on yard lights and rigged it to sound an alarm in our bedroom upstairs. We reasoned that if the bear decided to break into the aviary, we’d have enough time to get downstairs before it could pull out the steel bars.

Ed kept the rifle at the door, and he loaded it each night as we went to bed and unloaded it again in the morning. The trap remained in front of the aviary for a week. We kept putting fresh bait in and around the culvert, but no bear. Finally, Joe arrived and told us that if the bear hadn’t come back by now, he had moved on to another territory or had been trapped or killed by someone. So he hitched up his culvert trap and drove away.

That very night the alarm went off. It was one of those burglar alarm sirens that sounded with an alternating high and low tone like an ambulance or fire truck. It was deafening right there in our bedroom, and we jumped straight up and ran for our clothes as though the house was on fire. The alarm stopped for a few seconds and then began again. We knew that the bear was walking around outside the aviary building.

As we reached the back door, Ed grabbed the rifle and started down to the front of the aviary. I thought for a moment and decided that, since I was the only backup that Ed had, I should also be armed. So I dashed into the office to get the shotgun that Brent had left while Ed headed downstairs. I had just reached toward the shelf where we kept the gun when a shot rang out.

I grabbed the shotgun and headed outside. Ed was standing on the deck at the front of the aviary looking very glum. “I think I missed him,” he said. ” I hope I didn’t just wound him.” Ed said that when he’d reached the east side of the aviary, the bear was already tearing out a window. The bear heard or smelled Ed and had turned around to look for him. At that point, Ed took aim and shot. The bear jumped up and then ran downhill through the brush and into the woods below.

We were thankful that the bear had gone, but we were worried that it might be wounded and become even more dangerous. I called Joe, the trapper, and left a message on his recorder. We stayed at the aviary all night and, at first light, we scoured the brush for signs of the bear. We could see where the bushes had been crushed when he ran down the hill, but we couldn’t find him.

We checked inside the bird room and none of the birds appeared to be disturbed or hurt. We did our routine cleanup and feeding, replaced the window and waited for Joe to come. He hadn’t arrived by mid morning, and we had an appointment in town, so we left and returned at about 3PM.

We were standing around in front of the aviary wondering what to do next when Joe’s pickup rolled down the road. Joe had brought a helper and a truck full of dogs. They pulled up and got out of the truck and began walking toward us shaking their heads.

“Hey you old bear hunter!” trapper Joe yelled as he got within earshot. “That bear was right down here in the woods, deader than a doornail.” I couldn’t believe it. I was sure they were joking, and to me it was a horribly sick joke.

Joe told us that they’d decided they needed to track this bear down before it broke into another house and attacked someone. So they’d brought tracking hounds, camping gear and enough food to spend the night on Frazier mountain. The tracks at the aviary were clear, and they set one of the hounds loose from there to give them a direction to hunt for the bear.

The dog had run howling down the hill, across a small dirt road and into the woods below. Chasing after the dog, they found her jumping up and down over the body of the bear, not 100 yards away from the building! Joe said that the bullet had passed completely through the bear’s body and had pierced its heart. The bear died instantly and had fallen and rolled down the hill. I wanted to see the bear, but it had already been removed by the warden, and all that Joe could show me was the spot in the woods where the bear had been found.

I shudder to think back now to that first night. In the hours before we’d normally have gone down to the aviary, the bear could have devastated our birds at leisure. Miraculously, not a single bird was lost or seriously injured. I hate to think of what could have happened if our dog Shadow hadn’t warned us and literally dragged us out of our bed.

Janelle Crandell has a degree in communication and a background in sales and marketing. She has been breeding birds for approximately 12 years, beginning as a hobby and evolving into a full-time activity with the formation of Avitech.

Greys and Conures Have Different Needs »

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