California resident finds bear below house after wildfires

4 days ago 39

CALIFORNIA - A 500-pound (227kg) bear was hiding under a house.

No, really. This isn’t the start of a nightmarish nursery rhyme.

Last week, a homeowner in Altadena, California, who had been displaced by the Eaton fire returned to find a 525-pound bear still nestled in a crawl space underneath his house. The bear – let’s not call him Goldilocks because that’s just too easy – had arrived before the fires, and the destructive conditions had delayed efforts to remove him.

“I have a Ring camera that has got a light on it, and I kind of just put it in the hole and into the crawl space, and there was a giant bear there,” the homeowner, Mr Samy Arbid, who purchased the property just a few months ago, told the local affiliate ABC7 in a Jan 31 report. “I couldn’t believe it.”

As he tried to figure out a plan for the California black bear (the only kind of wild bear in the state), Mr Arbid, who did not respond to a request for comment, told ABC that the Eaton fire had forced him to evacuate.

The bear, however, did not leave. And when workers for the local utility company, SoCalGas, arrived to restore power to Mr Arbid’s home, they realized that a very large bear was there to greet them and informed Mr Arbid they could not complete their work.

This is not actually an uncommon sighting for the state’s foothill communities, where homes generally do not have basements, said Mr Kevin Howells, an environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who helped remove the bear. Bears often get into crawl spaces in the area, and this particular bear had been spotted by neighbors in recent months.

Mr Howells said the department did not typically help remove bears in these situations, but instead issued recommendations to homeowners on how to coax them out and board up any openings.

However, when utility company employees expressed discomfort about working around a 525-pound bear to restore power to the area – who can blame them? – the fish and wildlife officials made an exception.

If they had tranquilised the bear, he would have been too large and heavy to pull out of the crawl space. So Mr Howells, who has worked closely with the animals in recent years, got creative.

First, he set a trap. Then, he lured the bear out of the crawl space with a feast from a grocery store down the street: rotisserie chicken, sardines with tomato sauce and peanut-butter-smeared apples, among other treats.

Within minutes,...

Read Entire Article