Animals such as bears and wolves belong in the wild, far from our sight, in the forest, where they roam freely, far away from civilization. We may occasionally visit them at zoos but (luckily for us) never get the chance to encounter them without thick iron bars between us.
It’s true for the great majority of us but not the family from Lake Tahoe, California, who had a close encounter with a bear who was living under their house!
“He poked his head out and I said, ‘He’s coming out!’”
The family suspected nothing unusual until they heard noises coming from the crawl space of their home. They listened to the sounds and went outside to investigate and reached a very chilling conclusion: something very large and very much alive was living under their house!
As it turned out, the family left the door to the crawl space under their home wide open (literally) which allowed a local bear to find a nice and cozy place to spend his long winter sleep. The family immediately contacted the Bear League, a California-based agency which deals with statewide bear emergencies.
“Crawl spaces are perfect because they’re cave-like,” Ann Bryant, executive director of BEAR League, explained. “They’re dark, they’re quiet, they’re dry, they’re safe — they’re just absolutely perfect, so if a bear finds an opening, they go in and go, ‘Oh wow, this is great!’ In the winter we deal with it pretty much every day.”
A strange silence which had everyone fooled
Bryant told the family she would return the next day to move the bear to a more appropriate spot but the same day, the family stopped hearing noises and assumed the bear had left their crawl space. The husband even closed the door leading to the crawl space but that turned out to be a big mistake.
The unexpected visitor was still inside.
“During the night he [the husband] heard him and he was horrified because he realized, ‘Oh no, I locked him in there,’” Bryant said.
The next day, Bryant helped move out the bear from the family’s crawl space and somewhere safe.
“They didn’t want anything bad to happen to the bear, they were worried about him and they felt so bad for locking him under there,” she said.
The bear safely leaves the family’s crawl space
Bryant found another entrance to the crawl space and succeeded in drawing the animal outside. She instructed the wife to observe from the window to see when the bear comes out but he did so only when Bryant herself went outside to see what’s wrong.
She said the magnificent animal wasn’t afraid of her but soon after, the bear’s instincts kicked in. “He stood there first wondering, ‘What do I do, what do I do?’ And then he ran!”
She also explained that the bear, who found a place to spend the winter somewhere far from humans, was already familiar to the Bear League.
“We’ve known him for a really long time,” Bryant said. “He loves the local Mexican restaurants — he gets into their dumpsters.”
Nature is everywhere around us, even if we may not notice its existence, and it takes but little for civilization and wilderness to meet each other.
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
Source: Bear League on Facebook
