A black bear is on its way back to the mountains after it was captured by Fish and Wildlife officers at the Spyhill Landfill on Monday afternoon.
Staff at the northwest dump spotted the cinnamon coloured black bear at about 1:00 p.m. and called in the authorities.
“Wildlife is not uncommon on the landfill sites but typically its coyotes and deer that we would normally see and a bear is certainly something that we wouldn’t see very often and in fact I think it’s a first for us,” said Landfill Operations Leader Corey Colbran.
Landfill officials pulled back their staff and closed the facility for about an hour.
“We just shut down operations in the interest of public safety and employee safety and called in the appropriate authorities. Once Fish and Wildlife officers were here, they take control of the situation and we just left it to them,” said Colbran.
Calgary police responded and were able to coax the bear into a tree so they could cordon off the area.
“This is a very high volume area, lots of traffic in and out of the landfill and with that and with businesses nearby we had a lot different people we had to contain and a lot of different people we had to redirect in order for Fish and Wildlife to move in and do what they needed to do,” said CPS Sergeant Travis Juska.
Fish and Wildlife officers put a tranquilizer dart into the bear and then waited for it to take effect.
“It went almost according to plan, when we darted it, about four and a half minutes in, the bear started falling out of the tree, and it actually got hung up by its neck so I had to climb up the tree in order to grab it, unhook its neck, then I was able to lower it bit by bit down,” said Fish and Wildlife officer Mark Hoskin. “We’ve put it into a steel trap where we’ll take it into the mountain area, a mountainous area to be released.”
Hoskin says the plan is to take the bear to a relocation site near Canmore where it will be released back into the wild.
