Marcie Palmer has seen plenty of wildlife in her Kennydale neighborhood. She\u2019s seen coyotes, deer, possums and raccoons. Last summer a cougar was spotted in lower Kennydale. But April 23 was the first Kennydale bear sighting for the City Council member and many of her neighbors.<\/p>\n
Kennydale Elementary was abuzz with tall tales when Palmer dropped her son off at school just before 9 a.m. She kept hearing talk of a bear, and at first thought someone at school was dressed in costume. After all, Kennydale\u2019s mascot is the Kodiak bear. But then the students said the bear was outside.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe kids were telling us there was a bear sighting and a SWAT team over on 16th,\u201d Palmer recalls. \u201cThe kids and even the staff were confused. There was a lot of excitement and wild stories going on. Kids were saying they can\u2019t go out to recess because of the bear.\u201d<\/p>\n
A school bus stop was moved out of the bear\u2019s path, and police sectioned off Northeast 16th Street from about Aberdeen Avenue Northeast to Dayton Avenue Northeast.<\/p>\n
Palmer rushed to Northeast 16th Street and Blaine Avenue Northeast, where a 250-pound black bear was up a tree, surrounded by about 20 Renton firefighters, police officers, an Animal Control officer and Bruce Richards, officer for Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife.<\/p>\n
Renton police first received a call about the Kennydale bear from Robbin Schoonmaker just before 6 a.m. Schoonmaker spotted the bear in her yard when she went outside to tend to her barking dog. She called 911.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said, \u2018I don\u2019t know if this is an emergency, but there\u2019s a huge black bear in my yard,\u2019\u201d Schoonmaker says.<\/p>\n
The bear left her yard. She didn\u2019t hear anything about it for about an hour and a half, when she took her son to school.<\/p>\n
\u201cI heard cars screeching,\u201d Schoonmaker says. She thought, \u201cOh my gosh, there\u2019s a bear in the Renton Highlands.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schoonmaker lives at Northeast 16th Street and Aberdeen Avenue Northeast.<\/p>\n
From Schoonmaker\u2019s house, police say the bear ran down Aberdeen. Palmer says she heard a Kennydale Elementary boy say he then spotted the bear at the Safeway about half a mile away. The bear then wound up high in the Northeast 16th Street cedar tree.<\/p>\n
Fish and Wildlife officer Richards climbed a Renton fire truck ladder about 80 feet up the tree and shot two tranquilizer darts into the bear. He then roped one of the bear\u2019s legs, which wasn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had a hard time putting a rope on a bear that kind of wants to bite you,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The darts made the bear woozy, and he tipped over backward onto a tarp net below the tree.<\/p>\n
It was gravity that brought the bear down, jokes Jeff Vollandt, a Renton firefighter with the city\u2019s technical rescue team.<\/p>\n
But even gravity wasn\u2019t enough to finish the bear. Richards, the wildlife officer, had to inject tranquilizers into the bear twice more after his fall from the tree.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took quite a bit,\u201d Richards says. \u201cEven when he came down from the tree he was still going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Several police and fire officers then rolled the bear in the tarp and loaded him into an animal control truck. It took six men to lift the bear, Palmer says. The job wasn\u2019t finished until about 9:30 a.m.<\/p>\n
Palmer was just one of the spectators at the tree, which stands in the yard of a Kennydale home.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe homeowners were standing out there with their mouths hanging open,\u201d Palmer says.<\/p>\n
Many of the firefighters and police officers weren\u2019t any different, Palmer adds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just got a kick out of the officers,\u201d she says. \u201cAll the public safety officials were just so stunned. They\u2019re human, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Palmer snapped photos of the bear from about five feet away. That was the closest she\u2019s been to a bear.<\/p>\n
Renton firefighter Jeff Vollandt hasn\u2019t seen many bears up close either. He saw a bear once, in the late 1980s, when growing up in Newcastle, but never like this.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is one of those things you only see once in a career,\u201d he says. \u201cYou don\u2019t see a bear in areas like this, you just don\u2019t. It\u2019s kind of out of the ordinary. It\u2019s nice to do something different.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fish and Wildlife officer Richards has seen more than one bear in his career. But not in neighborhoods like Kennydale. Controlling the Kennydale bear was especially tricky.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was an ordeal,\u201d Richards says. \u201cIt was something I don\u2019t normally do with ladder trucks and the whole thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richards says the bear is about four or five years old, and probably came from May Valley. He is one of the first to come out of hibernation.<\/p>\n
The bear is now secured in a bear trap \u2013 basically a big pipe \u2013 in the yard of Richards\u2019 Enumclaw home. He plans to have the bear checked for injuries at PAWS and then take him back to the wild. But not until the weather warms, melting the snow in the mountains and giving the bear access to food.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d take him quite a ways away, a long, long ways, or he would probably come back,\u201d Richards says. \u201cThe trouble is a long, long ways away, all there is is snow. There\u2019s not the right conditions to putting the bear out now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Emily Garland can be reached at emily.garland@reporternewspapers.com or (425) 255-3484, ext. 5052.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marcie Palmer has seen plenty of wildlife in her Kennydale neighborhood. She\u2019s seen coyotes, deer, possums and raccoons. Last summer a cougar was spotted in lower Kennydale. But April 23 was the first Kennydale bear sighting for the City Council member and many of her neighbors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":13620,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-13619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13619"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13619"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=13619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}