A local motel was a scene of excitement early afternoon Thursday when a yearling black bear wandered onto the premises.
"We were talking with one of our guests and she was like 'I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you, but there is a bear,' and I'm like, what? No way!" said Carrie Melo, a supervisor at the Spruceland Inn on Central Street West near 15th Avenue.
In a panicked state, the bear darted about the motel courtyard. While co-workers took cover, Melo waved her arms and came close to chasing it out.
When a truck pulled into the entryway blocking the creature's path, Melo called on the driver to honk truck's horn. The driver did more than that and more or less herded the bear into a stairwell and corner the animal while Melo called 911.
Turned out, conservation officers and RCMP were already in the area and looking for the creature after receiving a report shortly after midday of a sighting at Spruceland Elementary School, less than a kilometre to the west.
The students were kept inside the school while, with the help of an RCMP dog and handler, they had followed the bear's scent through a nearby greenbelt.
"It got sighted a couple of times but it managed to get away on us," conservation officer Eamon McArthur said. "We conducted some patrols in the area and then we got another report that there was a bear out near the Spruceland Inn."
They arrived to find the bear in the stairwell. The bear was tranquilized, tagged, removed and released back into the wild north of Prince George, McArthur said, and noted there were no recent reports of garbage bears in the area.
"My thought is it probably wandered (into the city) in the dark and maybe laid down in the thistles or whatever, because it had a few burrs in its fur," McArthur said. "And when the school bells started ringing, I think it just got scared, was running around and just didn't know what to do."
He said it was among the oddest spots to find a bear in the five years he's been a conservation officer in Prince George. He did have to deal with a bear that had wandered into the garden centre at a local big box store a few year ago.
"Normally, they stick to the woods but if they're that panicked, you never really know where they're going. But there was no evidence of aggression and there weren't even any garbage cans knocked down in the area to suggest it was even remotely a garbage bear which is why we made the decision to let it go," McArthur said of the one he dealt with on Thursday.
Melo said the encounter made for a few tense moments, particularly when it looked like the bear was heading in someone's direction. "But once it was trapped upstairs, it wasn't so bad," she said.
McArthur said conservation officers have been busy doing "nightly audits" looking for households who leave their garbage cans out the night before collection day. Those who are caught risk a ticket carrying a minimum $230 fine.
"Keep it in," McArthur advised. "If you've got to get up at 7 a.m. to put it out, it's better than having been the cause of a bear issue in your neighbourhood."
Sightings of bears in residential and business areas can be reported by calling the Conservation Officer Service hotline at 1-877-952-7277.
