wildlife

A couple of days ago, I threw out an orange that had gone bad - threw it at a distance, as if it were a baseball - to see whether something would eat it.  Obviously a bird or a critter has opened it up, and it's now been occupied by huge black ants.  Which would be fascinating in its own right - but was upstaged, half an hour later, by our going for an early morning walk and encountering ... a bear!  A brown, furry, positively cuddly bear (they have been coming down from the mountains because it's so dry and parched this summer), which ambled across the road and then, realizing we were looking in its direction, lolloped off down the green belt and towards the railroad tracks.  

This is the first bear I've seen in Eldorado in 23 years.  A few years back, someone posted to Nextdoor in rather disgruntled fashion that they'd moved here because they'd become fed up with bears in California, and they'd looked out of their window that morning and seen one in a tree.  But this is not ... usual.