For those lucky enough to have homes to return to in Altadena, going home meant dealing with unfinished chores left behind when the Eaton fire forced them to evacuate. For some, that meant paying overdue bills or cleaning out freezers filled with rotting food, all in the midst of trauma and toxic surroundings.
For Samy Arbid, who had moved into a home just a block from the fire line in November, there was a different kind of obstacle: a 525lb black bear.
Arbid had met Beary before the fires. Shortly after the HVAC engineer moved into the house, in a part of Altadena that was spared by the fire, he discovered that the clanking sounds that he, his wife and their dogs could hear beneath the master bedroom were being made by a massive bear who had apparently moved in there first, while the home was unoccupied.
Then, as first animal control and then the California department of fish and wildlife sent people out to confirm that, yes, the bear was using the crawlspace for shelter, but no, there was nothing they could do to help, Arbid also discovered that a neighbor had been feeding the bear “for years”.
Despite the bear’s size, Arbid said, Beary was able to enter the crawlspace without making much noise at all. But when he did bump into a pipe below the house, often on his way out for a midnight snack, Arbid’s dogs would go nuts. That forced Arbid and his wife to abandon the bedroom and sleep, with their dogs, in the den. Dangerous encounters with black bears are rare in California, according to the wildlife department, but they can be “unpredictable”.
Then the fire came and the Arbids were forced to evacuate, having not solved the problem of Beary, the name given by Arbid’s neighbors to the downstairs tenant.
After the fire was contained, the gas company let Arbid know that they had been unable to turn his service back on, since there was a huge bear in their way.
This is when Arbid caught a lucky break. Before the fire, authorities told him that the bear was his problem. But now that his home was in an emergency recovery zone, the California wildlife department came in to help remove the bear.
Kevin Howells, an environmental scientist with the department, assessed the situation and decided that the bear was far too big to tranquilize and drag out of the crawlspace door. So Howells went to a local supermarket and got the makings of a feast to tempt the bear from its hiding place and into a cage placed near the home: rotisserie chicken, sardines and peanut-butter-smeared apples.
As the department explains on its Instagram account, “Within minutes of placing the trap, the bear came out of the crawlspace, walked in and triggered the trap door. The bear was transported in the trap into Angeles National Forest and given a welfare check, GPS-collared, and measured before being safely released just after midnight.”
