Bear Maximum
A large bear weighing roughly 280 pounds broke into two kitchens, two garages, and a car on Saturday, August 9, beginning at about 4:30 p.m. Town Wildlife Specialist Steve Searles said it is a large black on black male brown bear.
“Anybody reading this story that sees a bear that’s black over greasy jet black with no markings and a pink tag in its right ear, green tag in its left ear should call MLPD or me immediately,” Searles said, who has been unable to locate the bear since Saturday.
“It must have heard about the Margaritaville [The Mammoth Margarita Festival],” OJ Zeleny, one of the affected homeowners said. OJ and her husband, Don, both in their mid-60s, have owned property in Mammoth Lakes since 1978 and this is the first time a bear has broken into their house on the Hillside cul-de-sac above Forest Trail, a half block above the Village. “We’ve seen them walk across our property and we had a big one under the porch but the neighbor’s dogs scared him away,” OJ said. “Maybe we need dogs; cats don’t quite do the job.”
Although they were both at home, the Zelenys didn’t hear the bear enter their kitchen. OJ was alerted to its presence when she heard some dishes clanging in the kitchen and her cat came running back to the master bedroom with a “fluffed up tail” and looking for a hiding place. “In emergency situations, being scared doesn’t set in until it’s over,” OJ said. “You just have to react.”
OJ began yelling “bad bear” while the bear jumped up onto the kitchen island, before leaping to the kitchen counter and out the kitchen window. OJ had the window open, but the bear broke through the screen.
“He was polite. He didn’t break my crystal ball [full of almonds that he did eat.] He didn’t wreck the frame [of the screen],” she said. “But he didn’t get into the food or the fridge. I guess we were lucky that way.”
“He just wasn’t scared,” OJ said. After jumping back out the kitchen window, he turned around, stood up on his hind legs with his paws on the sill, and looked back into the kitchen as OJ moved to close the window. “The drawer holding cooking pots is close at hand so I grab two lids and bang them like cymbals and the bear runs down the deck stairs and on down to the street below,” she said.
Before the bear was in the Zeleny’s kitchen, he had walked into a garage on Grindelwald while the owner was working on the house. “I responded while he was chasing the bear [who] went down three houses from there, reached into a car, and ripped out a framed backpack,” Searles said. “He took off running with it in its’ mouth. I searched the backpack, there was no food in it.”
Searles shot a beanbag at the bear with his shotgun and the bear kept running towards North Village. He saw the bear on top of a mountain bike lying at the bottom of the Downtown Mountain Biking trail, with no owner in sight. Searles shot the bear again with a beanbag. “I wanted to get it away from drunkfest,” he said, in reference to Margaritaville. “Unbeknownst to me, he jumped through [the Zeleny’s] window.”
“I was out on the street trying to locate the bear and they called my cellphone,” he said. After Searles surveyed the Zeleny’s house, he continued up Canyon Blvd looking for the bear, who he found at Mammoth Estate Condos where he shot the bear again. “It was a rodeo,” Searles said. “I was trying to drive it westbound away from the event.”
Searles called for backup from the Mammoth Lakes Police Department (MLPD) and while Searles waited for the police officers, the bear went into another garage and stole a ham. “The bear was sitting in the middle of the road, eating the ham,” Searles said. “I had already shot him four times.” The bear looked at Searles indignantly until he was shot again with a beanbag. “I’ve worked with a lot of bears and I’ve never seen something quite like that.”
“I wanted him to tree so we could control the situation,” Searles said. The bear started running through the houses, until Searles shot him again and finally climbed into a tree. Searles then called the Department of Fish and Wildlife. “Normally there are big tags so that you can read the number,” Searles said. “We knew it had to be either King’s Canyon, Sequoia or Yosemite because the Parks are the only ones allowed to hang tags.”
Searles said that if a bear has been tagged “he’s been handled and a repeat offender. It’s a way of identifying bears who are problematic or having issues.”
The bear eventually left the tree, ran up Forest Lane and Searles then lost track of the bear and has not seen him since.
But he “went into another kitchen, opened the fridge, and started tossing [food] everywhere,” Searles said. Although the owners weren’t home and therefore didn’t contact the police until much later.
After Yosemite confirmed that it wasn’t their bear on Sunday, Searles called friends in Tahoe who said the tags were “a color code for a Nevada bear which doesn’t make any sense,” Searles said. “Come to find out, the bear was an Incline Village bear that was busting into houses. It was boxed up and taken to the Sweetwater Range out of Bridgeport on the Nevada Border.”
Searles has not received the documentation to confirm this, but that’s what the Department of Fish and Wildlife said via their contact with Nevada Department of Wildlife. “The colors match, we do not when the bear was dropped there, but it walked over 60 miles,” Searles said.
Regardless of where he came from, he is “a very resilient bear who obviously has learned what he needs to do to get into kitchens for food,” OJ Zeleny said. “He’s a smart bear and cute as a dickens. But he can’t do that. He needs to go eat the natural food.”
“I want to remind everyone that we are in the third year of drought and the bears are food stressed,” Searles said. “During the next few months, use good judgment. Don’t feed the bears and close first story windows.”
