Bear spends day in Petaluma tree, then bails
A black bear spent all day Sunday perched in a towering redwood tree in a Petaluma residential area before finally making its way down and ambling off into the night, apparently having had enough of suburban life.
“The bear has come down and just started to head out of town,” Petaluma police Lt. Nick McGowan reported late Sunday.
The bear’s appearance before dawn Sunday caused a stir, bringing officers, neighbors and animal welfare agents to the scene — a ruckus that perhaps led the animal to seek refuge for more than 17 hours, McGowan said. It finally came down just after 9 p.m., pausing to take in the neighborhood before trundling off to the city’s southwestern outskirts and the presumably
more conducive rural area.
“The bear finally felt secure enough to retreat from the tree,” McGowan said. “That’s animal instincts. It didn’t like everybody
watching it.”
The bear wandered into the city’s western Raymond Heights neighborhood before dawn Sunday and found refuge in a redwood tree near I
Street between Sixth and Eighth streets, according to Ken Paglia, a California Fish and Wildlife spokesperson. City animal welfare officers then spent the day keeping watch on it in hopes of shepherding the animal out of town and back into the wilder outskirts.
Police initially closed roads in the area, urging residents to stay inside their homes and keep their pets indoors.
The bear made clear throughout the day that it was in no hurry to make any move before nightfall.
“Once the bear kind of feels that things are calming down, then it’ll feel safe enough to get down on its own,” Paglia said Sunday evening. “We’ll at least give it till tonight, and tomorrow we’ll kind of reassess things.”
Paglia said authorities decided to stand by and allow the bear to climb down and return to its habitat on its own. If that had not happened, authorities planned to tranquilize the bear and transport it to a nearby habitat — but that could be risky given how far up in the tree the bear was, officials said.
“It’s high enough where if it fell, it could get hurt, so it’s kind of a difficult situation in that sense,” Paglia said while the bear watch was in progress.
When bears are tranquilized, Paglia said, biologists typically find a nearby open space that is safe for a bear and would minimize the chance of it wandering back into neighborhoods.
McGowan said the animal appeared to be a black bear. Sightings and nuisance reports involving black bears have been on the rise in the mountainous areas of Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties. State wildlife biologists are studying the bear population in the North Bay, hoping to eventually track the animals’ movement and plot their home ranges.