Bear captured after wandering through center of Los Lunas

LOS LUNAS — Edward Espinosa’s morning didn’t get off to its normal start Tuesday at his home behind Daniel Fernandez Park in Los Lunas. At about 8 a.m., Espinosa got a big brown surprise when he went outside to wash his windshield.

“I looked over there by the fence by the park, which borders my property,” Espinosa said, “I saw it and I thought it was a big dog. I looked again and I said, ‘My God, that’s a bear!’”

The sighting of the juvenile bear prompted warnings from the village of Los Lunas to residents between Sichler Road and N.M. 314, south of Courthouse Road, all day Tuesday and into the next day — when the black bear was sighted off Luna Avenue, just west of Los Lunas Middle School.

After scaring the owners of a dog spa and their clients, the bear was tracked to a Valencia County Sheriff’s Office’s holding yard on Luna Avenue and captured by a N.M. State Game and Field officer, Valencia County Sheriff’s Deputies and Los Lunas Animal Control personnel Wednesday morning.

“We had a report from up near the transfer station… and then we found him down (near Luna Avenue) about an hour later,” said Mary Askew, code enforcement and animal control supervisor for the village of Los Lunas. “They’ll cover some ground when they want to, you know. So (the bear) had been all over the area, it seems like, between last night (Tuesday) and this morning.”

Serenity Pet Spa co-owner Amanda Tyree and co-owner Celeste Telles were just starting to take in pets when she saw the bear.

“I was outside getting ready to check in some dogs and I saw some rustling in the bushes in the back of our property — something brown moving and I thought it was somebody’s dog,” Tyree recalled, “then lo and behold, it’s a bear! It came running down across the next door neighbor’s backyard area and then I think we scared each other.”

Tyree said the bear ran behind a shed and she ran back inside, closing gates and then warning her clients to stay in their cars with their pets.

“I called animal control and the police and within five minutes they were there,” Tyree said, “and poor thing, it was terrified. Terrified. It didn’t know how to escape.”

Askew said the bear was a “super young bear,” weighing less than a 100 pounds.

“I think he was just scrounging for food and rummaging trash more or less,” she said on Wednesday. “We had no reports of him hurting anybody or anybody’s animals or anything. We think this was the only bear in the area.”

Askew said the teenage bear had likely been separated from its mother for quite a while, addressing whether a mama bear might also be in the area. As to how the bear came to be wandering in the area off N.M. 314, Askew said there are “a lot of different opinions.”

“It’s kind of hard to say,” she said, noting that animal control trapped a fox near Camelot and Long Bow Loop recently. “They (bears) come out from Socorro County and they come down from the East Mountains. They’ve had reports of them in Las Maravillas before, so it’s just hard to say where he might have meandered over from.”

Askew said N.M. Game and Fish personnel will relocate the bear to the mountains after it was sedated and captured.

Tyree said the whole incident was startling but was happy the bear was treated humanely.

“You know animals,” she said. “(Mary) said the (Desert Willow Complex) fire wasn’t big enough to displace any animals. So he was probably just wandering around looking for food. I guess you call him ‘Smokey Bear.’”