A black bear is seen in the backyard of a home on Silver Street in Centralia.
This photo of the bear was taken on the 700 block of South Rock Street.
Residents living in one neighborhood of Centralia had an uninvited visitor come though Thursday afternoon.
A black bear was spotted roaming the streets on Chestnut, Silver and Rock streets several times in the morning before officials isolated it in the top of a tree in a backyard on West Chestnut Street.
Although Centralia police were the first to respond, the situation was handed off to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
“We don’t usually deal with game animals,” Centralia Detective Patty Finch told The Chronicle on Thursday.
WDFW arrived at the scene around 4:30 p.m. and shot the bear with a tranquilizer, but it took several hours for the shot to have any effect.
Meanwhile, law enforcement officials set up a tarp to catch the bear when it fell out of the tree.
Once the bear was sedated, WDFW transported it to Gifford Pinchot National Forest, where it was released back into the wild.
Centralia police first got reports of a bear cub roaming the streets starting at about 7:45 a.m. but they weren’t able to find the animal. The next call came in at 3:20 p.m. and they found the bear soon after.
Fall is a critical season for black bears. It’s the time of year where they binge eat and try to store enough calories to hibernate through the winter, sometimes roaming into human territory in the process.
“That’s what we’re looking at here,” Craig Bartlett, a spokesman for WDFW, said. “Bears are out and about and start denning in October. So it’s at that time when bears are out and about.”
There are an estimated 25,000 black bears living in Washington state, and they are the most common source of potentially dangerous conflicts, according to the WDFW website. In order to minimize bear encounters, officials recommend people store their garbage in tightly sealed containers and indoors, if possible.
Bears also are drawn to pet food or bird feeders that are left outside.
