Johnny Diaz
Miami: A handyman in Colorado was thirsty while working on a deck at a residence last week when he ventured to his truck for some water. He found a startling stowaway.
“I opened the door and saw the bear sitting there,” Andy Kerrigan, the handyman, recalled of his June 23 encounter in Steamboat Springs, a popular ski resort city in the state’s north.
“I was astonished, surprised,” said Kerrigan, 52. “He was sitting shotgun, eating my lunch.”
A garage camera captured the encounter outside a duplex owned by Justin Pickar and his wife, Meg Warder, who shared a one-minute video.
Pickar later received a text message from Kerrigan, whom he and his wife call “Handy Andy”, that piqued his interest.
“If you review your garage door camera, you might find some funny footage of me, opening my shotgun door and being surprised by the bear sitting shotgun eating my lunch,” the message said, according to Pickar.
“It’s just a crazy encounter,” Pickar said by phone.
After Kerrigan discovered the cub, he whipped out his phone to snap pictures. He then banged on the front of the truck to shoo the cub away.
When that didn’t work, Kerrigan looped around the truck to the driver’s side and discovered that the window, which he had left partly open, was fully down.
“He basically charged me, and that’s when I backed up and fell on my derriere,” Kerrigan said.
He believed the bear must have pushed the window down when it climbed inside. He said the bear might have been injured because he saw some blood on the door handle, centre console and seat.
Kerrigan briefly paused, thinking about his next move as the bear munched on what was left of his sandwich, chips and cookies.
Kerrigan eventually returned to the driver’s side and opened the front and passenger doors. He then removed a long piece of wood from the truck bed “to try to shoo him out of the vehicle with a little bit of prodding”, said Kerrigan, who swatted the wood against his truck several times.
Success! The cub left through the driver’s side and circled to the truck’s passenger side as Kerrigan chased it away.
“I was relieved,” he said. “I felt bad. I don’t like feeding bears human food – a fed bear is a dead bear.”
He believes the same cub had previously been spotted in the area, looking for food. “He has been running around town wreaking havoc, breaking into cars,” said Kerrigan, who has previously encountered bears feeding from worksite dumpsters.
“I will throw rocks at the bears or snowballs to get them out of the dumpsters,” he said.
It’s not unusual for bears to show up in unlikely places, especially when hungry or seeking shelter. Colorado is home to an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 black bears, and most conflicts with people occur when bears gain access to human food sources or other attractants, according to Travis Duncan, a spokesperson with the Colorado Parks and Wildlife department.
Black bears were known to inhabit the western half of the state, especially areas thick with Gambel’s oak, chokecherries and aspen trees, the state agency said.
Recent Californian bear incidents include a black bear that broke into a zoo to mingle with other bears last October. In August, a black bear walked into a closed ice cream parlour near the south shore of Lake Tahoe, where it feasted on several flavours. And last year, a 525-pound bear nestled into the crawl space of a house after wildfires in Altadena.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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