PANAMA CITY — At 6 a.m. Monday, a large crowd gathered in front of John Plage’s property at 1304 Buena Vista Blvd. There was a 150-pound bear 30-feet up in a tree in his front yard.
This is a troubling discovery regardless of extenuating circumstances. However, this is the third bear sighting in Panama City in a month’s time.
“Usually we go four to five, six years without seeing a bear in town,” Kirkland said. “This is the third encounter in a month.”
Most of the people in the crowd on Buena Vista were in uniform, from Panama City Police and Fire departments and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Some of them were armed with rifles equipped with tranquilizer darts and others were preparing a cushion for the bear’s unconscious free fall from its perch.
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Observing this commotion, the male adolescent bear descended from the tree and sprinted, just a mere 15 feet away from FWC officers. It ran across the street and slammed into Jonathan Boyaval’s chain-link gate three times, FWC spokesman Stan Kirkland said.
Boyaval said the bear was able to bend back the gate latch quickly.
“Bears are incredibly smart,” Boyaval said.
Springing into Boyoval’s backyard at 1217 Buena Vista Blvd., the bear climbed a long-leaf pine before finding a fork of large branches 60 to 65 feet up. As of Monday afternoon, the bear was still there. At that height, the FWC has no way to dart the bear, Kirkland said. Even if they could, the fall would inevitably hurt the animal.
Boyaval opined that the bear might be waiting until dark to make its escape. Boyaval was making sure to keep his three dogs — a pit bull, Rottweiler and yellow Labrador — inside, taking them out his front door for bathroom breaks.
“He would never come down with them barking up the tree,” he said.
FWC officers agreed, deciding to leave the bear alone in hopes that he’ll come down after dark.
The FWC has set up a covered trap. It’s basically a pipe the bear is meant to crawl inside of. Bait, a collection of dog food and sardines, is connected to a door. The bear goes for the bait and the door closes behind him.
“There’s rarely, if any, problems,” Kirkland said of this type of trap.
Kirkland said the bear likely traveled from land around Tyndall Air Force Base, possibly recently shoved into adulthood by its mother. Kirkland said it could have come up from a nearby creek and found itself in the populous, yet heavily wooded Panama City neighborhood.
Just last week, a full grown 350-pound male was spotted at 1507 W. 10th St. in St. Andrews. That’s just two blocks from where the same bear first graced the streets of St. Andrews in the 1200 block of Clay Avenue, where it was captured and relocated 90 miles away before returning to Panama City.