In my last column I wrote about a bear that had followed a child up the public beach stairs at Tideview Road in Langdale. The day Coast Reporter was being printed, I encountered the animal – and a woman fleeing from it.
My car was rolling slowly along Smith Road with my husband driving and me in the passenger seat. The woman, in a bright red dress, bounded in front of the car. She frantically waved her arms.
My husband, Al Hyland, hit the brakes. We were puzzled, surmising the woman’s destination was the ferry, and we were less than 80 metres from the foot-passenger drop-off road.
My husband lowered the window. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
“A bear!” Jennylee Silver said. She clambered into the car.
She and the bear had stared at each other “for a good three to five minutes,” said Silver, who lives in the YMCA Road area. She then walked backward, until our car came along.
As she told the story, the bear crossed the road in front of us. It lumbered toward the hill that separates Smith Road from the Port Mellon Highway. The bear turned and calmly checked us out. We drove on.
I presume it was the same bear as the one that had approached the child the week before on the beach stairs. We had encountered it just a block from the stairs, and it displayed the same undaunted behaviour. The BC Conservation Officer Service had set a trap for it on Tideview Road.
Conservation officer Dean Miller said the trap was removed after three days without catching the bear. “Some bears are shy of the traps we set and may even leave an area where they are set,” he said.
He said it was unlikely to be the same bear that had recently entered a home near Franklin Beach. It had been deemed aggressive and shot.
“This [the Tideview Road] bear has very little fear of people but most behaviours noted would not be classified as predatory,” Sgt. Miller stated in an email Monday. But the bear has become habituated to humans, he warned.
If you can bear to tell me any news you’ve heard about West Howe Sound, please email Elizabeth@Rains.ca.
