Bear crashes into Circuit City, heads home

A black bear burst through a glass door and into an electronics store Tuesday after a plan to scare it away from a strip mall in north Colorado Springs went briefly awry.

The wandering bear - a young male - ran at a full gallop toward the Circuit City at 7670 N. Academy Blvd. and pushed down a 3-by-4-foot pane of glass "like it was a doggy door," said assistant manager Tiffany Chang. Briefly trapped in a small room where customers pick up purchases too large for the main entrance, the animal banged its head against a second door, cracking it, then ran the length of the room twice before leaving the way it came in.

The minute-long episode was captured by store surveillance cameras just after 7 a.m.

The bear had been hiding in a tree outside a Fazoli's restaurant in the shopping complex since about 4:40 a.m., when a Colorado Springs police officer nearly hit the animal while driving on Academy Boulevard, police spokesman Lt. David Whitlock said. Under the direction of a state Division of Wildlife employee, firefighters shot a burst of water toward the animal in the hopes it would climb down and flee into a wooded area behind the strip mall.

Except for the brief shopping trip, the plan worked.

After leaving the store, the bear climbed another tree and hid out for a few minutes before running behind the building on a path leading to a neighborhood with large, wooded lots and drainages that would guide the animal toward Monument Creek.

"The thought process is, it'll find some place to sleep today and then, under cover of darkness, it'll leave the area," Division of Wildlife spokesman Michael Seraphin said Tuesday.

A commuter from Colorado Springs wasn't so sure about that phase of the plan.

Kathryn Hall, a graduate student in biology at the University of Colorado Denver, said she was on her way to an assistant teaching job about 10 a.m. when her car "clipped" a black bear on Rockrimmon Road. The impact damaged her fender and left tufts of fur in her wheel well and scat on her door. Fortunately, she said, the animal survived.

"He got up and ran away," said Hall, who reported the incident to the Division of Wildlife. Seraphin, who noted that bear sightings in Colorado Springs are common, couldn't say whether it was the same animal.

Tuesday was the second day in a row that wildlife sightings in greater Colorado Springs seized headlines. Monday, the El Paso County Sheriff's Office mounted an extensive search after reports that an African lion was roaming the grassy, sunbaked plains east of town.

A photograph and a single paw print led wildlife authorities to believe they were on the trail of the real thing. But as the day wore on, the experts grew skeptical after calling in the Colorado Springs police helicopter and flying in a crack dog handler from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in New Mexico, Seraphin said.

"That was the final thing, that the dogs couldn't pick up a lion's scent in any of the areas where it had been spotted," he said. Better photographs, the lack of additional tracks and reports rolling in one after the next accounting for lions in regional wildlife refuges all bolstered the decision to abandon the search, he added. It remained uncertain what the animal was as of Tuesday evening, he said.

DETAILS

Bear sightings are up this year along the southern Front Range because dry conditions make it harder to find food, pushing them into populated areas.