A video shared on Facebook shows the moment when forestry agents help remove a bucket that was stuck , for a week, on the head of a bear in Denver, Colorado (USA).
The bear spent an entire week running through the hills west of Boulder with a chicken feeder stuck to his head. When reported by residents, forest officials were able to track the animal.
The rescue was launched by two Boulder residents, Drew McConaughy and his friend Dave Sherman , who saw the bear while he was working at a cabin in the hills, The Denver Channel reported .
“We were sitting having lunch around noon and we heard a rustle in the woods , so we went down to investigate and saw the bear running through the woods, bucket on his head,” McConaughy said.
Once they saw what turned out to be a chicken feeder that covered the entire head of the animal, they alerted Colorado Parks and Wildlife agents. “We thought the bear was probably in danger,” McConaughy said.
They chased the bear and cornered it until it climbed a tree, then did their best to keep it there until wildlife officials arrived to proceed to the rescue.
When they arrived, officers used McConaughy’s ladder to reach the bear and then administered a tranquilizer so they could safely remove the bucket. The video shows the sedated bear lying on the ground while an officer cuts the bucket off his head.
“We depend a lot on the public to help us , reporting the activity and, in this case, helping us locate this bear,” Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesman Jason Clay told the Denver Channel.
Once the chicken feeder was removed, the bear returned to the mountains , Colorado Parks and Wildlife said. “A bear, naturally, should be afraid of humans. The point of how this bear got into that situation in the first place is that it broke into someone’s chicken coop and got the trough stuck to its head,” Clay said.
The wildlife center said it’s crucial that residents don’t leave anything that might attract bears out of the house to avoid another situation like this one.