A black bear that kept students at a Burnaby elementary school past the bell on Monday has been killed by the B.C. Conservation Officer Service (CSO) because of documented problem behaviour.
The 200-pound male bear wandered to within less than half a block of Cascade Heights Elementary near Burnaby Hospital sometime after 1 p.m., triggering a barrage of calls from concerned parents and eventually a shelter-in-place order.
“It definitely added something to our day,” principal Anthony Yam told the NOW.
RCMP officers followed it through several yards until conservation officer Clayton Debruin arrived.
The three-year-old bruin was then treed at 4091 Fir St. at about 3 p.m., when Debruin shot it with a tranquilizer dart. The bear fell out of the tree after a few minutes, breaking through the roof of a shed on the way down.
Before taking it away in a bear trailer, Debruin took the time to show the unconscious bear to onlookers, including some neighbourhood kids.
Students as Cascade Heights never got to see the bear and had to stay at school until about 3:20 p.m., according to Yam.
“They were very excited about the possibility of a bear being around, the novelty of that,” he said.
The Cascade Heights principal, who has only been at the school for about a year, said staff have told him they had never encountered a bear at the school before.
“I’m trying to figure this neighbourhood out,” Yam said. “I’m thinking where around here is there enough greenspace for a bear to live? I’m thinking where could it have come from? I have no idea.”
After looking into recent reports, Debruin said it looked like the bear had come from the Deer Lake area and had been pressing farther into Vancouver, triggering nine garbage and compost complaints in the last two weeks.
It had been spotted wandering under the Grandview overpass over Boundary Road and strolling through a Chevron gas station at Grandview and Boundary in broad daylight.
“Unfortunately we learned that he’d been into quite a bit of trouble,” Debruin said.
Once hooked on human food sources, bears will travel hundreds of kilometres to get back to them, Debruin said, so relocation wasn’t an option. It was destroyed Monday afternoon.
“It’s very tough, especially when we have a healthy bear,” he said.
