California resident finds bear below house after wildfires

CALIFORNIA - A 238kg bear was hiding under a house.

No, really. This is not the start of a nightmarish nursery rhyme.

Last week, a home owner in Altadena, California, who had been displaced by the Eaton fire, returned to find a 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 home owner, 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 realised 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 neighbours in recent months.

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

However, when utility company employees expressed discomfort about working around a 238kg 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, the bear emerged from the space and into the box-shaped trap, which Mr Howells and a team of seven other people worked to load onto a truck. The bear was taken to Angeles National Forest, sedated and fitted with a GPS collar before eventually being released.

“This was the largest bear I’ve seen in person in the flesh and got my hands on,” Mr Howells said.

Why had the bear stayed through the fires in the first place? Mr Arbid theorised that the animal had been afraid and was taking shelter.

But Mr Howells offered another explanation.

“He’s just probably trying to lie low, conserve energy and sleep for a while,” he said. “It’s dark. It’s quiet. And it felt safe. So there’s no need to go out, get out on the landscape, when the bear doesn’t need a high caloric intake this time of the year.”

One challenge for fish and wildlife officials was that residents in the area had been deliberately feeding the bear, which is illegal in California. Black bears generally pose no threat to humans and are mostly food-motivated.

“When people feed bears in these foothill communities, it just incentivises them to stay in the urban setting and around people,” Mr Howells said. “And then they lose that natural fear of people.”

He said that because the bears were being fed by humans, the animals learnt to “tolerate traffic, cars, people, all that stuff, which just increases the chance for human-wildlife conflict significantly”.

According to local news reports, the bear has come to be known as Berry, Barry or Beary in the area, depending on the neighbour you ask.

As to whether he will return, who could blame him for wanting another feast and a nap at a free Airbnb? NYTIMES