Friday - May 28, 2010

Bear With Us

A black bear that strayed onto the Pfizer campus in Pearl River [NY] today was safely captured this afternoon after a two-and-a-half-hour encounter, according to Orangetown police.

Police were told around noon today that the bear, a 150-pound male black bear, was wandering around the sprawling Pfizer campus off Middletown Road. Several town police officers went to investigate and they followed the bear until it climbed up a tree, according to Police Chief Kevin Nulty.

Police called state environmental officers for assistance and a biologist went to Pearl River to help with the bear’s capture. Nulty said that while the bear was in the tree the state biologist was able to shoot the animal with a tranquilizer gun.

Volunteers from the Pearl River Fire Department had been called in to assist police and set up a safety net to catch the bear. Nulty said the bear fell from the tree and landed in the net after being tranquilized.

Nulty said no one was injured and that the bear was not hurt during its capture. The bear, estimated to be about 18 months old, did not have a tag that would indicate it had been captured and recorded previously by state scientists. Nulty said the bear was to be tagged and would be set free in the woods of Sterling Forest in Orange County.

Once upon a time this “Pfizer campus” was owned by the American Cyanimid and was called Lederle Labratories. They made sulfa drugs during WWII and employed thousands of people. It’s a big factory and research campus with dozens of buildings and a parking lot the size of a farm. This is the place where all the polio vaccine was made back in the day. Centrum vitamins these days, and lots of other drugs. Some years later American Cyanimid became Amercian Home Products, who became Wyeth, which for a while was Wyeth-Ayerst. Corporate ownership doesn’t really matter here. I’m just mentioning it to highlight that the campus has been in place a very long time. Since 1907 I believe. I’m pretty sure of that date, since I grew up less than a mile away from the place. It’s located in the western heart of NYC suburbia, along the second busiest road in the county, next to a busy rail line, surrounded by fully built up towns. It is not rural. It’s not out in the woods. There aren’t any woods. For miles. And yet ... bears!

Don’t buy into the “encroaching habitat” lie. It’s not true. There wasn’t a bear for 100 miles when I was a kid. Now they are everywhere. They have learned to adapt. They have learned that suburbia is easy living. Heck, even though this little incident took a fire truck, 6 cop cars, the Animal Control guy, and probably the local Game Warden to solve, they made nice-nice with the bear by using a tranquilizer dart and sent him up to Orange County to go bother somebody else, hopefully Paul Sr, Paulie and Mikey from OCC.

Young bears go walkabout in the spring. If this one came down from the Sterling Forest area, or down from Harriman Park, it means he wandered through more than 30 miles of backyards and neighborhoods and busy streets and shopping malls before being spotted and captured. There are two grade schools within 2 miles of the Pfizer campus. One of these days these suburban bears are going to become a real problem.

Posted by Drew458     on 05/28/2010 at 01:27 PM   
Filed Under: • Animals •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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