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“We ended up like, ‘Oh my god,’ ” Lessans explained.
She attained for her cellphone and recorded a shorter online video of the bear that she later on posted to Fb. “We have a bear in our yard!!!!” she wrote.
Wildlife specialists at Maryland’s Section of All-natural Sources saw the online video and mentioned they believe the bear was a male about 1½ a long time previous and weighing concerning 100 and 200 lbs ..
It is “unusual but not unheard of” to see a black bear in a D.C. suburb, reported Brian Eyler, the video game mammal part chief for the Maryland DNR, and this is the time of year when younger male bears are venturing out and hunting for their possess territory. There were being numerous reports of black bear sightings in the Silver Spring region in June 2016.
On Tuesday, Lessans reported, she and her spouse tried using to get a greater check out of the bear from their screened-in porch, but when her spouse built a sounds, the bear fled. Several hours later, even nevertheless she claimed she experienced noticed a previous submit about a bear sighting farther north in Montgomery County, she could scarcely think it.
“I knew about the sightings,” Lessans reported, “and you see them on Facebook, but you think, ‘Oh, they could be in yet another state.’ ”
But, in hindsight, there were being signs. The couple’s backyard fowl feeder had been damaged before this week in a “strange way,” stated Lessans, who is effective as an artist. “It wasn’t as it if experienced fallen in excess of and broken. It was open like a further remaining could have performed it.”
The couple joked that it’s possible a bear experienced knocked it in excess of but didn’t consider as well a great deal of it. Her spouse received a new feeder and place it up.
Then, all around 7 a.m. Tuesday, she noticed the black bear having from it.
Lessans said she called community wildlife authorities but acquired disconnected as she was currently being transferred. Maryland DNR officials verified they obtained a report Tuesday of a bear sighting in the Silver Spring region.
Eyler said the bear in Lessans’s garden probably came from a considerably less-dense place to the additional urban area of Silver Spring through parklands and greenways. His division lately had a report of a black bear sighting in Howard County, he claimed, and “this could perhaps be the similar bear,” although he cautioned there was no way to know.
“We really don’t get them within the Beltway as generally,” Eyler said.
In 2014, a youthful black bear captured regional consideration when it took officials three several hours to scare it out of a tree on the grounds of the Nationwide Institutes of Wellness campus, near the Healthcare Heart Metro end in Bethesda. It was tranquilized and relocated to western Montgomery County. The year ahead of, a young black bear was relocated right after it was sedated and caught in Northwest D.C.’s Palisades neighborhood.
Black bears are native to the D.C. location, and officials reported there’s a healthy inhabitants of about 2,000, typically in western Maryland but slowly expanding outward. In the spring and early summer months, younger males are generally “dispersing and seeking to discover their have territory,” Eyler stated. Assume of them, he said, “as young adults attempting to come across their way.”
Officers advised the public to remove any items that would bring in black bears, which includes garbage, bird feeders and grills with grease.
Some other suggestions, potentially, went without the need of declaring.
“I just preferred to go out and give it a major, previous hug,” Lessans reported of the bear she encountered Tuesday. “It looked so cute. But I wouldn’t do that. I’m not insane.”
