A Mystery and Maybe a Bear

See this mess?  That's the scat of some evil creature along with the pipes from a windchime.  I had two big birdfeeders and a hummingbird feeder up at my place in Venango County.  When I came up last week, I found them all smashed to the ground along with an occupied birdhouse.  At first, I thought a vandal had done it; there's usually no one home up there, and the nearest neighbors are pretty far away.  Something or someone came up onto the deck, tore down a birdfeeder, and bent the nail that held it sideways into the rafter.  The bottle from the hummingbird feeder was completely gone, but someone had to unscrew it from the frame in order to remove it.  A little birdhouse was toppled to the ground with a nest inside.  And the main birdfeeder out front?  It had been attracting squirrels, so I attached a small windchime to the bottom of it.  Squirrels are twitchy, and whenever they stepped onto the birdfeeder, it caused the windchime to make a tinkling noise that always scared them away.  (I came up with that little trick myself, and I'm very proud of it.)  But last week, that birdfeeder was all bent up and on the ground with its windchime.

My first thought was that it was a vandal.  My second thought was that it might have been a bear.  But can bears unscrew bottles?  And yet, if it was a vandal, why did they only target things that bears would eat--like birdseed, sugar-water, and bird eggs?  If it's a bear, I thought, it was probably just passing through.  So I put things back in order and hoped for the best.  When I came back up after work on Thursday, same thing!  Except worse this time.  The big birdfeeder out front is completely gone, and the evil creature left a gift--that nasty scat in the top photo.  I found the pipes from the windchime scattered throughout the yard and mangled.  It looks like something...chewed them.  I love this place, but weird stuff happens here.  The creepy and mysterious creature in the woods behind the house turned out to be a red fox, which is way cool.  But I don't know if I'm equipped to share my space with a bear.  I mean, it came up onto the deck!  Oh, and it also snapped one of the cables that serves as a railing.  It must have climbed on the cable to get to the birdfeeder.  So destructive, it makes me want to take up hunting.