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Carol Lesans looked out the window over her kitchen sink on Tuesday morning and was stunned: As she watched, a black bear walked through the Silver Spring yard, lay down, and ate seeds from her bird feeder.
Her home, along Cutstone Way, is located in a dense wooded area near Route 200, so she and her husband are accustomed to seeing foxes and birds, including the occasional wild turkey. But after 33 years there, she said, it was the first time they had met a black bear.
“We were like, ‘Oh my God,'” Lesans said.
She reached for her cell phone and recorded a short video of the bear, which she later posted on Facebook. “We have a bear in our yard !!!!” she wrote.
Wildlife experts from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources saw the video and said they thought the bear was about 1 year old and weighed between 100 and 200 pounds.
“Unusual, but not unheard of, is to see a black bear in a DC suburb,” said Brian Eyler, head of the Maryland DNR’s mammal section, and it’s time of year when young male bears come out and search their own territory. There were several reports of black bear sightings in the Silver Spring area in June 2016.
On Tuesday, Lesans said, she and her husband tried to see the bear better from their covered porch, but when her husband made a noise, the bear fled. Hours later, though she said she had seen a previous post about a bear seen farther north in Montgomery County, she could hardly believe it.
“I knew about the observations,” Lesans said, “and you see them on Facebook, but you think, ‘Oh, they may be in another country.’ ”
In a “rare sighting,” a black bear was spotted in northern Virginia
But looking back, there were signs. The bird feeder in the couple’s backyard was broken earlier this week in a “strange way,” said Lesans, who works as an artist. “It would not have happened if he had fallen and broken. It was open, as if another being could do it. “
The couple joked that maybe a bear knocked him down, but they didn’t think much about it. Her husband took a new feeder and put it in.
Then, around 7 a.m. Tuesday, she saw the black bear eating from it.
Lesans said she called local authorities about the wildlife, but it was interrupted while she was relocated. DNR officials in Maryland confirmed that they had received a report Tuesday about a bear sighting in the Silver Spring area.
Eyler said the bear in Lesans’ yard probably came from a less dense area in the more urban area of Silver Spring through parks and green paths. His department recently received a report of a black bear sighting in Howard County, he said, and “it could be the same bear,” although he warned there was no way to know.
“We don’t get them inside the ring road that often,” Euler said.
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In 2014, a young black bear caught the region’s attention when employees took three hours to scare it off a tree on the National Institutes of Health campus near the Bethesda subway station. He was reassured and relocated to western Montgomery County. A year earlier, a young black bear had been relocated after being drugged and caught in the Palisades neighborhood of northwestern District of Columbia.
Black bears are native to the District of Columbia, and authorities said there is a healthy population of about 2,000, mostly in western Maryland, but it is slowly expanding outward. In the spring and early summer, young men usually “scatter and try to find their own territory,” Euler said. Think of them, he said, “as teenagers trying to find their way.”
Authorities have advised the public to remove all items that could attract black bears, including garbage, bird feeders and grease grills.
Some other advice may have been self-evident.
“I just wanted to go out and give him a big, old hug,” Lesans said of the bear he met on Tuesday. “She looked so charming. But I wouldn’t do that. I am not crazy.”
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