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Carol Lessans looked out the window over the kitchen sink Tuesday morning and was amazed: as she watched, a black bear walked down her Silver Spring yard, stretched out, and ate seeds from her bird feeder.
Her home, along Cutstone Way, is in a very wooded area near Route 200, so she and her husband are used to seeing foxes and birds, including the occasional wild turkey. But after 33 years there, he said, it was the first time they had encountered a black bear.
“We were like, ‘My God,'” Lessans said.
He grabbed his cell phone and recorded a short video of the bear which he later posted on Facebook. “We have a bear in our yard !!!!” she wrote.
Wildlife experts from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources watched the video and said they believed the bear was a 1-and-a-half-year-old male and weighed between 100 and 200 pounds.
It’s “unusual, but not unheard of” to see a black bear in a DC suburb, said Brian Eyler, head of the mammal hunting section of the DNR in Maryland, and this is the time of year when young male bears venture and search. their own territory. There were several reports of black bear sightings in the Silver Spring area in June 2016.
On Tuesday, Lessans said, she and her husband tried to get a better view of the bear from its protected porch, but when her husband made a noise, the bear fled. Hours later, although he said he had seen a previous post about a bear sighted further north in Montgomery County, he could hardly believe it.
“I knew about the sightings,” Lessans said, “and you see them on Facebook, but you think, ‘Oh, they could be in another country.'” ”
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But in retrospect, there were clues. Bird feeding in the couple’s backyard had broken down earlier this week in a “strange way,” said Lessans, who works as an artist. “It wasn’t like he had fallen and broken. He was open like any other being could have done.”
The couple joked that maybe a bear had knocked him down, but he didn’t think too much about it. Her husband grabbed a new feeder and put it on.
Then, about 7 a.m. Tuesday, he saw the black bear eating it.
Lessans said he called local wildlife authorities, but disconnected while transferring her. Maryland DNR officials confirmed they received a report Tuesday of a bear sighting in the Silver Spring area.
Eyler said the bear in Lessans Yard probably came from a less dense area in the more urban area of Silver Spring through parks and greenways. His department recently had a report of a black bear sighting in Howard County, he said, and “it could be the same bear,” though he warned there was no way to know.
“We don’t put them in the Beltway so often,” Eyler said.
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In 2014, a young black bear caught regional attention when officials took three hours to scare it off a tree on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health campus near the Medical Center subway stop in Bethesda. . He calmed down and moved west to Montgomery County. The previous year, a young black bear was moved after being sedated and trapped in the Palisades neighborhood of Northwest DC.
Black bears are native to the DC region, and officials say there is a healthy population of about 2,000, mostly in western Maryland, but it is slowly expanding outward. In the spring and early summer, young males are usually “dispersing and trying to find their own territory,” Eyler said. He thinks of them, he said, “as teenagers trying to find their way.”
Officials advised the public to remove any items that attracted black bears, such as garbage, bird feeders and greasy grills.
Some other tips, perhaps, went unsaid.
“I just wanted to go out and give him a big, old hug,” Lessans said of the bear he found Tuesday. “She looked so adorable. But she wouldn’t do that. I’m not crazy.”