Residents of Arcadia, California had a wild visitor drop in for Labor Day.
When they awoke and looked out their windows, they saw a large bear walking down the road.
A 350-pound black bear was wandering through the street of the sleepy Los Angeles suburb.
Neighbors couldn’t believe what they were seeing at first, Fox News reported.
One Arcadia resident described how excited she got when she heard about the holiday visitor.
“I shut the windows and I’m looking out like ‘where’s the bear?’” she told Fox.
“Then I saw it walking and I went ‘Oh my God!’
“And then I ran and got my phone, trying to film it but I wasn’t very good at it. I filmed like the trees instead of the bear.”
This bear was big enough to be shocking—but small enough that California Department of Fish and Wildlife personnel and Arcadia police could shoot it with a tranquilizer dart and load it into a cage to truck it away, the Daily News reported.
The bear was not injured. When it awakens, it will be ready to roam in the wilderness area where the animal control officers deposited it.
Not That Odd
Although Arcadia is only 13 miles from downtown Los Angeles, it is also close to nature. The suburb backs up against the San Gabriel mountains—and it is likely to get visitors from the forest.
NBC reported that a bear actually entered an Arcadia home on July 14. The homeowners came home around 8 in the morning and found the bear stealing their dog’s food.
Silvana Puglisi, who lives next door to that invaded home, said she saw bears frequently—and had in fact accidentally locked a cub in her garage while fleeing the mother a few months earlier.
In another incident on March 29, 2017, a bear picked through garbage cans looking for savory treats—and was filmed walking off with a bag of trash, ABC reported.
A mother bear and cub spent a few hours in a tree in one Arcadia resident’s yard on Nov. 20, 2014, the LA Times reported.
A man in Arcadia also filmed a pair of bears playing in a neighbor’s yard in 2011.