Anne McDermott of Topstone Drive was falling asleep about 11:30 p.m. Monday when she heard a noise out on her screened-in porch and sprang to her feet to find out what was the matter.
She raced to the glass sliding door that connected to the porch.
“I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but I wasn’t expecting to see a bear,” McDermott said.
The bear looked her over, decided she wasn’t much of a threat, and continued eating the bag of birdseed that had been sitting out on the porch.
“No, I wasn’t scared,” McDermott said of her encounter with the black bear. “I think it was trying to figure out what to think of me.”
She called the police. She alerted her sleeping 17-year-old daughter, Gwen. The bear left, returned briefly, then left again. The police did not actually see the bear, said Capt. Jeffery Kreitz, spokesman for the department.
The police notified the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
The first thing in a case like this is never leave food out, including wild bird food, near the home, said Cyndy Churnacko, spokesman for the DEEP.
Bears usually emerge from hibernation during mid-March, but in this case it has been a relatively mild winter, so this bear was apparently awake early. The bear was hungry and looking for food. The aroma of birdseed on the porch caught the bear’s attention, and in through the screen he went.
“It’s not common,” Churnacko said of this case of a bear entering someone’s porch. “It really is an unusual occurrence.”
Churnacko said McDermott did the right thing by calling the police rather than chase the bear off herself. That could be dangerous.
If stalked by a bear, don’t run, she said. Walk slowly to get out of the area. Making lots of noise may scare it off, too.
Other general advice is to keep garbage can lids covered tight.
For McDermott, it was her first time encountering a bear. She has spotted coyotes, bobcats and foxes in the past.
“I was just so surprised,” she said.
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