After hearing odd noises that sounded like snoring, a California family discovered that five bears had spent the whole winter season hibernating under their house. Taking to Facebook, the Bear League Group, which works to preserve bear habitats and help bears in distress, recounted the family's astonishing episode last week.
Providing details of the incident, the group said that residents of the home had been hearing “some odd rumbling, snoring-like noises” throughout the winter. However, they had been ignoring the mysterious sounds because they “simply didn't make sense”.
The neighbours even suggested that the family might be imagining things because they didn't hear anything. However, when the bears - a mother and four cubs around a year old - woke up, the human residents of the home “could no longer deny there was probably a bear under the house,” the Facebook post read.
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The Bear League Group described how one mother bear, along with three of her own cubs and an adopted orphan, had decided to spend the winter in the crawlspace under a local house in California. The group was brought in to “un-invite” the mother bear, only to be surprised by four cubs also living under the house.
“The residents didn't realize there were five bears under their house until we got there and told the bears to come out... and then we counted five,” Bear League Executive Director Ann Bryant told HuffPost. “They had just thought it was one very noisy bear.”
Further, Ms Bryant said that the process of “un-inviting” the mother bear involved being territorial and scary, thereby making the bear believe it is not going to be safe there anymore. She emphasized that the volunteers of the organisation never physically hurt bears.
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Ms Bryant went on to explain that once the mother was roused out of the crawl space, she called back the cubs and they followed her out. According to HuffPost, after the bear family vacated the space, an electric barrier was installed in the crawl space opening so any bears trying to get in will get a small shock. Ms Bryant added that prevention is the best defence against unwanted bear lodgers.
