A male black bear that wandered through Halethorpe and Arbutus for several days was returned to the wild in western Maryland Aug. 14, possibly with a hangover.
The night of Aug. 13, state wildlife biologist Paul Peditto used a tranquilizer dart to fell the 140-pound bear in a residential area off Benson Avenue in Arbutus.
He injected a second dose during the hands-on capture, after the bear dozed off.
“It was sleeping like a baby,” said Sgt. D. Nowack, one of several police officers from the Wilkens Precinct who assisted in the capture.  “It was tranquilized, out cold, snoring.”
Sgt. Nowack would not give his first name.
A contract between the Baltimore County Police Department and the police union prohibits the department from releasing first names of police officers, according the police spokesman Cpl. Michael Hill.
A 28-year veteran of the county police department, Nowack said he had never encountered a bear outside the wilds of western Maryland or a zoo.
“There is nothing in our planning book for handling bears,” he said.
Arbutus area residents first reported the visitor to police Aug. 12.
“A series of bad navigational decisions” brought him to Baltimore County, Peditto said.
“He just happened to be in the wrong place,” he said.
The bear apparently had made several stops in southern Maryland before heading north through Anne Arundel County, then crossing into Halethorpe, according to Peditto, who heads the Wildlife and Heritage Service at the state Department of Natural Resources.
“We had been tracking him for a month,” he said, noting that DNR staff kept track of citizen complaints to determine the bear’s progress.
The pattern of complaints indicated the bear’s course of travel.
Black bears are seen mostly in Garrett, Allegany, Washington, Frederick and Montgomery counties, according to the DNR Web pages.
Last year, the department received 296 black bear nuisance complaints for these five counties, but none for Baltimore County.
As Peditto knows, the complaints from Halethorpe and Arbutus marked a first.
Shortly before 8 p.m. Aug. 12, Arbutus resident Alycia Davis, 17, said she was greeted by an unexpected sight in her back yard.
“I just went outside and I saw it,” said Davis, who lives in the 5500 hundred block of Southwestern Boulevard.
Davis, who will be a senior at Lansdowne High, said she was “shocked” at her first sighting of a beat outside of a zoo.
“I ran inside too quickly to see (what the bear was doing),” she said, adding she told her mother, who called county police.
Officers did not see the bear when they arrived, but Davis said it was there the next morning.
Arbutus resident Cory Koons said he was surprised but “exhilarated” to find a bear outside his Larlin Road home about 7:30 p.m. Aug. 13 and called county police.
“It was actually sitting in my back yard,” said Koons, whose dog noticed it first and started barking “quite angrily.”
When police arrived minutes later, the bear had moved to a neighbor’s yard and sat eating applies from a tree, said Nowack.
Other officers tracked and “contained” the bear until DNR staff arrived, he said.
 “I was able to sneak up and get a dart into him from about 50 feet,” said Peditto, who added he made the shot at about 8:45 p.m.
After taking the hit, the bear ran almost 200 feet and disappeared into a dense thicket off Benson Avenue, where he collapsed.
“With help from county police, we found him dozing in the poison ivy and briars,” Peditto said.
Otherwise unharmed by his month-long clash with urban civilization, the animal was transported to a DNR wildlife management facility in Washington County for a physical exam and identification tagging.
DNR biologists estimate his age at 1 1/2 to 2 years, which equates to late adolescence in human terms.
They determined he could survive in the wild, tagged him for future reference and set him free in a remote area of state-owned property in Washington County.

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