Tim Morrison’s first thought when he saw police lights shining in his Fort Richmond front window at 4:30 a.m. was that he was the subject of a raid.
VIDEO: Bear in the city
“I thought, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy,’” Morrison said. “Then I noticed they were all looking up and I looked up also, and saw this big silhouette in the tree.”
A black bear sits in a tree outside a home on Laval Bay this morning.
Up in his front yard elm tree across from his second floor bedroom window was a black bear.
Four police cars plus Manitoba Conservation officers were on the scene. Morrison and his wife enjoyed their view of the bear, two metres from their window, for the rest of the morning.
“As the sun came up, we just stayed and watched. (Conservation officers) shot it with a dart, it started to yawn a lot, and then it just fell out of the tree.”
He said it took about 20 minutes for the tranquilizer to put the bear to sleep. It was a relatively young bear, not much larger than a large dog, “but thicker.”
Morrison had got up early to let his bloodhound dog out in the back yard. The bloodhound never noticed a thing, he said.
Fort Richmond isn’t typically bear country. Laval Bay where the bear was treed is south of University of Manitoba and about a five-minute drive from the Red River, Morrison said.
Free Press carrier Jusuf Mehmedovic was the first one to spot the bear. He reported it to police.
It’s the second time in two weeks a bear has wandered into Winnipeg. In the earlier case, a bear was discovered in a city park in North Kildonan. Manitoba Conservation says they handle about three bears a year in the city.
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