For the first time in as long as I can remember, no one this past week has mentioned to me anything about an April Fools Day story in the Faribault County Register.

No one asked me if there was one. Or guessed which story it was. Or asked did we totally forget to do one.

Maybe it was because of the weather that no one asked about it. Perhaps no one realized it was April 1. I  think I blame it on COVID. I mean, aren’t we blaming everything that has happened or not happened in the past two years on COVID?

The truth of the matter is, there was indeed an April Fools Day story in the Register last week.

I think some of the problem was that it was not bizarre or crazy or wild and wacky enough to be spotted as an April Fools story. And, that might be a good thing. Except for one thing – I think people are believing it to be true.

Perhaps they did not read to the very end of the story when it was revealed that not everything in the story was true, and that it was an April Fools story.

In case you are still wondering, it was the page 2 story last week about the Bear Feed and the bear that was killed in a combine in Winnebago and the stuffed bear in the Winnebago Museum.

A lot of that is true.

There did used to be a Bear Feed. A bear was indeed killed in a combine way back when in Winnebago in 1980. And there is certainly a stuffed bear in the Winnebago Museum. The picture on page 2 with the story is not fake, he is there and looks scary.

However, it is not true that there are any plans being made by Bob Toland to bring back those famous Bear Feeds; it is not true that the bear in the combine provided the meat for the first Bear Feed; and it is definitely not true that the stuffed bear in the Winnebago Museum is the combine bear victim.

The bear in the combine was a black bear. The bear in the museum is a huge, scary, snarling grizzly bear. It was indeed actually shot by Ed Habeger on Kodiak Island, Alaska, back in 1976, and not taken down by a combine. Ed’s parents, Elwood and Lucille Habeger, were former residents of Winnebago.

I mean, really. If that museum-residing monster bear had been hit by the combine, I think the combine would have been killed, not the bear.

One thing that is true is the ad that accompanies the story. It is an ad from Tafco that ran in the Oct. 30, 1980 issue of the Blue Earth Post. We did not fake the ad. It did indeed have the wording of “If bears keep clogging your corn head – you need more light on your combine. To avoid picking up rocks and bears, put a Tafco night rider light on your machine and see better forever.”

Pretty clever ad.

Bears are seen wandering around southern Minnesota every great once in a while. Up in northern Minnesota they are a common sight.

Although, I must admit that on my many canoe/camping trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, I never saw a bear. Our outfitter always had a map of the BWCA with red dots where bears had been spotted all summer and we tried to avoid those areas.

However, the truth is we did see a black bear up close and personal on our last trip to the Boundary Waters which was just a couple of years ago.

On that trip we did not canoe and camp and travel across the BWCA from lake to lake. We had decided we were all getting too old and crippled up to do it.

So, we rented a cabin right on the edge of the BWCA, and went out canoeing and kayaking from our home base.

Two of us had spotted a bear a long distance away the first couple of days we were there.

Then one day there was quite a clatter of noise just 10 feet out the window of our cabin. A black bear had knocked over a feed bin that looked like the manger from Bethlehem. I took one quick photo of the bear out the window (shown above) but then I went out to get a picture of the bear, of course. It circled the cabin and then went down the path to the lake.

At the lake it went out on the dock and made a perfect swan dive into the water and swam across the lake.

My companions questioned my sanity, of course, going after a bear with just a camera. I was lucky, they said, that it did not turn and start coming after me.

Yeah, maybe not my smartest move ever. And to be truthful, if the bear had been like the one in the Winnebago Museum, there is no way I would have been following it to get a picture.

I would have been high-tailing it the other way as fast as my little legs could take me, trying to find a combine to hide behind.