Dealing with a stubborn wild animal requires a little bit of ingenuity.
Frustration can lead to some off-the-wall solutions.
And Colorado wildlife officials devised this insane plan to get a bear out of a tree.
Wildlife officials try to figure out how to get bear out of a tree
Colorado has a healthy population of black bears that are known to wander into populated areas in search of food.
Typically, Colorado Parks & Wildlife (CPW) leaves the bears alone unless they start trying to rummage through garbage cans for food.
“We try as much as possible to keep our hands off the bears unless human safety is threatened,” CPW Northeast region spokeswoman Kara Van Hoose told Cowboy State Daily.
Golden, Colorado on the western edge of the Denver suburbs has plenty of bears that come down from the foothills of the Rockies.
A black bear was reported wandering around Golden in broad daylight.
CPW officials and the Golden Police were called in to intervene.
“It had settled into this tree in a populated area right next to the Colorado School of Mines campus,” Van Hoose explained.
“It wasn’t a full-grown adult bear, but it wasn’t a little yearling either,” Van Hoose continued. “It was probably in about that 2-year age range.”
The plan was to wait out the bear and have wildlife officials and police guide it out of town when it came down.
But things weren’t going as smoothly as they planned.
“We waited for maybe three hours. It came down and started heading in the right direction. Then it saw something it didn’t like and went up another tree,” Van Hoose said. “So we waited about five more hours.”
The bear finally came down and they thought that they had their opportunity.
“It started running in the right direction, but then it saw a human maybe a little too close, and it took off up another tree,” Van Hoose recalled. “By this time, the bear was agitated and ‘huffing,’ we weren’t sure what to do next.”
Drone playing Black Sabbath used to try and get bear out of the tree
The Golden Police Department came up with the idea of using the department’s drone to play “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath to scare the bear out of the tree.
“He said, ‘We have external speakers on our drone. Do you want to try hazing the bear with music?’ And I was in charge of the music. I started cycling through my playlist,” Van Hoose explained.
Van Hoose said that she thought about playing Metallica.
“I wanted something that started off kind of intense and would seem weird to the bear, something not like anything the bear had ever heard before,” Van Hoose stated. “Then I saw ‘Iron Man’ by Black Sabbath come up on my playlist.”
So up when the police drone blaring “Iron Man” near the bear.
But the bear ignored the song.
A wildlife official joked that “if he starts banging his head, we have a problem.”
Finally, after a few hours, the bear climbed down the tree and ran off.
Colorado wildlife officials now know from first-hand experience that Black Sabbath isn’t the key to getting a bear out of a tree.
Read All About It will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
