JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Here's a post on GoFundMe that caught our eye today.
ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
It reads, a 500-pound bear has been living underneath my home in Altadena for over a month, and it has caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage.
SUMMERS: Ken Johnson wrote that message. We reached out to him but did not hear back. Last November, he caught a black bear tearing away mesh and squeezing through a small opening below his house in Los Angeles.
SCHMITZ: This situation was quite frankly...
SUMMERS: Please don't do this.
SCHMITZ: ...Unbearable. And to make matters worse, state wildlife officials were at a loss at how to remove Johnson's new roommate.
ANN BRYANT: We felt so bad for him because a state agency wasn't able to help him. They don't know how to do this.
SCHMITZ: That is Ann Bryant, executive director of the BEAR League. It's a nonprofit and specializes in safe bear evictions. They swooped in to help.
BRYANT: I've done a lot of them myself, and right now, I'm 74 years old, and I'm still doing this.
SUMMERS: According to Bryant, they do over a hundred of these bear evictions every year, equipped with paintball guns carrying nontoxic ammunition. The first step, scope out the den.
BRYANT: You check out the area. Where did the bear go to get in? How many other openings are there for him to get out?
SUMMERS: Step two, send a trained operative to sneak beneath the house and get behind the bear.
BRYANT: You try and scoot around under there, crawl around amongst the spiders and the mice that are always under crawl spaces.
SUMMERS: Step three, fire away.
BRYANT: And then he started firing paintballs. So then that got the bear up, and he's like, what's that? Who are you? And what are you doing here?
SCHMITZ: Another volunteer on the outside of the house watched the entrance to the crawl space.
(SOUNDBITE OF BANGING)
BRYANT: He sees this enormous head appear out of this small hole and then the bear struggling and clawing and trying to get out.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Go. Go. He's out. He's out. He's out.
SCHMITZ: The bear ran off. Then they boarded up the entrance and placed an electrified unwelcome mat in the openings. When the bear tried to return that night...
BRYANT: Coming right back to that same opening - that was his claimed home - seeing the mat and not knowing what it is and then stepping on it and jumping and backing away and running off.
SUMMERS: With any luck, the bear will take a big pause before coming back again.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRUCE REITHERMAN AND PHIL HARRIS SONG, "THE BARE NECESSITIES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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