The bears on Broadway caused quite a buzz for Eureka residents on Monday, but Human-Wildlife Conflict Biologist Kiana Hargreaves says the whole ordeal was a piece of cake; “so our original plan was to take the sow out of the tree and then have the cub come down on its own, but how everything was going on, the cub ran to the mom while she was still in the tree. and so we were able to take a catch pole and put that around the arm of the cub, and then brought the cub down first.”
Broadway is a busy street, and there were minor concerns about the onlookers.
Hargreaves emphasized, “There were a lot of things going on, and it’s totally natural for people to be like, oh, like something’s happened in the pierson’s, you know? So it’s totally fine to take a look, but keep on moving. We did have some people that got onto the roof, like, right next to the tree. And that situation is not great. So for those ones, you know, it’s dangerous for the people on the roof.
So it just causes a lot more stress…and in these situations, we need to move quickly, and we want it to have the least amount of stress on the animals as possible.”
After EPD closed off the scene, Hargreaves says this experience went smoothly, but there are always risks when dealing with wild animals.
“so these situations are, you know, it could be really dangerous for the animals or us for people watching, because you never really know what’s going to happen when you’re darting, like there are tons of different influences. so darting is one of our last options. like, we don’t want to put the animal through that kind of stress. but in this situation, everything lined up where that was our only option, and that was the best option.” says Hargreaves.
Once they got the cub out of the tree, Hargreaves sedated the mother.
“We checked her breathing. We put an ear tag on her, and then we also fixed her with a GPS collar. Then we were able to bring the sow down afterwards, and then, once we were able to bring them to the BLM property where we released them, they did great. They reunited.” Hargreaves stated.
Some residents are still wondering why the bears were in this situation in the first place.
Human-Wildlife Conflict Biologist Ian Keith thinks that the cub and sow had been pillaging the local garbage cans.
Keith warns the residents; “bears are smart. they’ll have their own internal, you know, calendar and they’ll remember when trash day is. so just making sure the best thing is just, you know, exclusion, exclusion, exclusion, you know, preventing bears from getting access to things like that.”
It is bear season, and knowing how to protect yourself and your local wildlife is important. For more information, you can visit the link below.
