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Quiet neighborhood gets bear scare
Police, animal control and DEC catch critter after weeklong visit  
  
By RYAN HUTCHINS, Special to the Times Union
First published: Wednesday, July 4, 2007

BETHLEHEM -- A black bear that had been milling around a residential neighborhood for nearly a week was captured Tuesday morning by animal control officials.
Stories of the bear have been circulating through the Salisbury Road area since the bear was first spotted last week.

  
"It's been an adventure," said Emily Eames, who lives on the street and watched the bear's capture.

Eames and neighbor Fred Strauss said town police, town animal control and officials from the state Department of Environmental Conservation pursued the bear before it climbed a tree and was shot down with a tranquilizer at about 10 a.m.

"All the men were chasing it and screaming for everyone to go back in the house," Eames said.

The bear climbed about 50 feet up a tree in a yard on the corner of Salisbury Road and Capitol Avenue, Eames and Strauss said. The trackers subdued it by shooting it with a tranquilizer.

After being tended to by the DEC and an animal control officer, the bear was awake and moving.

DEC workers put the bear in a trailer and told Strauss it would be released somewhere in the town of Berne.

Neither the town's animal control officer nor DEC officials could be reached for comment.

Strauss hadn't seen the bear before Tuesday but said several neighbors had reported sightings.

Eames said she first saw the bear about four days ago. Her husband told her to look out the window into their backyard, where the bear was climbing on their bird feeder.

"All the neighbors around here have their own little stories," she said.

Dont feed the humans..hhmm...I mean bears.....