Published: June 27, 2008 12:54 am         

Claysburg bear on YouTube

Md. wildlife agency prepares for just these kinds of events

You may as well join the thousands of others who have viewed the YouTube video showing the recent incident in Claysburg, Pa. — just a hop, skip and tranquilizer-dart shot up U.S. Route 220 from Cumberland — during which a bear was first struck with a sedative projectile by Pennsylvania Game Commission personnel and then shot to death with bullets from the firearms of local law enforcement officers.

You can see it at youtube.com/watch?v=-TQSIJeev6s

The incident has caused a real uproar in Pennsylvania and has gone international with the airing of the video, recorded by a local resident, on the popular YouTube network.

Actually, I learned a lot more about the incident by reading the articles from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Altoona Mirror than from the video, though the film was interesting.

In essence, a bear — described in one printed article as a cub and in another as weighing 300 pounds — is in a tree. It is shot with a tranquilizer dart. It comes down the tree and runs. Police shoot at it a lot and hit it some. It runs again. Police shoot a lot more and apparently kill the bear, though the animal cannot be seen on the video at that time.

One thing is certain from watching the video. The wildlife agency people and the police people found themselves in some pretty tough working conditions. I wouldn’t want a few hundred people standing behind me and hollering and taking photos while I write an outdoor column.

“Hey,” one might shout, “you better put a comma behind that second word.”

Or “You call that typing? My grandmother can type faster than that and she’s dead.”

Well, it appears to me that the biologists and the officers found themselves in such a situation. They were trying to deal with the bear and at the same time protect the crowd that was making their jobs more difficult.

The video gets a little ugly, in the behavioral sense, when some of the more aggressive spectators go face to face with an officer or two. It appears to me that the fired up Blair Countians are smart enough to stop just short of getting taken into custody.

Both the game commission and the constables defend their actions as being appropriate and my best guess from a distance is that they are correct.

I’ve said for some time that I fully expect a black bear to sniff the wind on some summer Thursday, realize that the aroma of corn and tomatoes and berries is in the air and stroll into the middle of the Farmers’ Market that is set up on Cumberland’s Town Centre.

If and when that or something similar happens, Maryland’s wildlife biologists and local law enforcement will find themselves dealing with the same kind of situation that took place in Blair County, Pa., recently.

If and when that happens, it won’t be the first time a bear has visited downtown Cumberland.

In the late 1960s (I’ve tried my best, but can’t come up with the exact date or the appropriate news coverage from the incident) a bear wandered through various Cumberland neighborhoods and was eventually shot and killed by city police on the steps of the former City Hall. That’s the building on Frederick Street downtown that now houses the Cumberland Senior Citizen Center.

Harry Spiker, the chief bear biologist for the Maryland Wildlife Service, said his agency prepares for Claysburg-type situations by working ahead of time with law enforcement agencies.

“We have been setting up training sessions about bears for public services agencies since 1988, having up to two or three a year,” Spiker said. The sessions are attended by state, county and municipal police, 911 staffs, fire companies, animal control units and others. An average session will have 30 people representing 20 or so agencies.

“We let them know what we consider to be serious incidents, such as injury to a human, livestock, pet or even an injury to the bear,” Spiker said.

“On calls about a bear in a tree — and we get a lot of those — the most important thing is to control the crowd. Keep the people away from the bear and it will climb down and go away.”

A bear in a Westernport tree a summer ago was a touch and go event, according to Spiker.

“We found out later that the bear had been in the tree for 24 hours and that’s because people were coming by all night long shining spotlights on it. It never had a chance to climb down and go away.”

Spiker and his crew told the Westernport crowd that it has to back up before the bear would be dealt with.

“There was a chain link fence directly under the bear and I didn’t want the animal falling on it,” Spiker said. Eventually the bear was darted and when it fell it hit the edge of a net that had been placed to catch it, snapping a supporting rope and falling into a fenced yard.

“We used a jab stick to apply more tranquilizer,” Spiker said, adding that the bear was then handled without further incident.

Spiker tells responding agencies not to flash lights or sound sirens, actions that would further startle a bear and cloud its judgment. “The tranquilizing drugs we use are actually counteracted by adrenaline, so we don’t want to excite a bear any more than it already is,” he said.

Contact Outdoor Editor Mike Sawyers at msawyers@times-news.com.