I forgot my manners too. Welcome to the forum LEDeez. I know bright lights and strobes don’t scare raccoons, because three were in my kitchen recently, eating cat food. It turns out the laser from a Glock .40 caliber shining directly on their cute little faces doesn’t scare them either, and no, I wasn’t even considering shooting them. I just wanted them to have dinner elsewhere. I had to actually chase them out, and they were only very slightly bothered by that. And these are raccoons. Bears? Yikes.
are those lasers like most hand held lasers? I have a fairly mild one but it will still blind your eye permanently. Raccoon might have a difficult time finding his way out.
Yeah I never really saw how the average strobe would disorient people and scare away animals as many claim. Really I think strobe is on average less bothersome than just plain bright light in the face: with strobe you have the off fraction of a second cycle to see and operate off of. I think it makes more sense that this off/on strobe may cause animals to just see less detail and essentially “fixate” on the larger objects (like the human standing there) and drown out the area around, whereas in pure bright light animals tend to “freeze” and stay still until they can see.
You’re brave. I wouldn’t be shining a flashlight at a bear like that unless it was attached to something that goes bang.
From the FWIW department-
Like the deer whistles on my cars, I can’t say this really works but an old Tennessee woman told me bears hate the smell of Lysol so when camping she would set 4 bottles out past the corners of her camp with rags wetted like wicks stuck in them and she never had a bear in her camp even though others nearby did and the woods around there were definitely chock-full of bears and all other sorts of critters.
Nor have I hit a deer with my cars. Could just be luck or there might be something to it.
Phil
Yeh, I’ve used the “deer whistles” off and on for years. One driver told me he used them until he was on an Alaskan highway and saw a herd of deer put up their ears and look around when he came over the hill — then they all ran right into the road in front of him. I looked them up with Google Scholar and, wouldn’t you know, some researchers have actually tested the things and tested acoustic rigs that duplicate the sound they make and found them ineffective —- apparently a warbling variable noise gets the animal’s attention a lot better than a single sustained note.
Who knew? Now I just drive slower and let the people behind me honking their horns warn the deer away (grin).
Apropos post-fire recovery, I’ve worked on restoring a fire site up in the Mendocino N.F. since the late 1980s and there’s a surprising trick — if you have a burnt area, you can discourage the invasive European and Asian grasses (medusahead, cheatgrass brome). Those love fire and have very shallow wide roots that capture all the minerals in the ash the first winter-to-spring season. They sprout up like crazy, spread, intercept every drop of dew and rain that falls — and are dry and ready to burn by June.
A grass fire going through that stuff sounds like popcorn — and behind the flame front there’s a smooth black sooty ash covered with little bright green seeds, that popped out of the ripe awns. Ready to root again. A few cycles of that and you have a far worse fire hazard.
Answer? Believe it or not, try this on a few square yards. Get a 50 or 100 pound bag of sugar, make up a saturated solution, spray the ground til it looks glazed.
There’s better stuff to use — anything more complex than sugar works better; here’s a test with sugar beet pulp:
Here’s the idea: That available carbohydrate feeds all the microbiology in the soil, plumps that stuff up, that then scavenges all that available mineral ash — and by the time the cheat and medusa start to grow in the spring, you’ve got a healthier soil and no excess minerals. Starves the damn cheat and medusa back. That gives the natives — which are much more deep-rooted and barely poking up a leaf or two — time to recover.
Yeah, you’ll get the hairy eyeball from any checkout clerk who remembers moonshining — or we did, in Lake County, back in the day. Maybe not these days.
Works surprisingly well, helps get plants established and more to the point all the fungal mycelia that give structure to the topsol, that need to recover after the fire’s gone.
And you can make a load of rock candy with the excess sugar water. Don’t forget to clean your sprayer (grin).
Lol, luckily we don’t either, but that sign made me chuckle 