A black bear walked into a Juneau apartment building early Tuesday and got lost, leaving police with the job of going in to find it.
But before police could spot the bear, it appears to have climbed onto a desk, which toppled, and exited the downtown building through a broken window. No one was hurt, but at least one person got an unwelcome visitor in their apartment, the Juneau Police Department said in a Facebook post.
The police response started around 12:25 a.m. Tuesday after a resident of Fosbee Apartments on Disdin Avenue reported the intruder, said Erann Kalwara, a Juneau police spokesperson.
According to the department's Facebook post, the bear entered the building's laundry room through a door "thought to be accidentally left open and later closed." Residents stored overflow garbage in the room, the post said.
The bear then went into a hallway and pushed its way into an apartment, "startling the male occupant," the post said.
The man yelled, and the bear left his apartment but continued its trek around the building. It entered a staircase "where inward swinging doors prevented the bear from leaving," the post said. Officers searched for the bear and found the ground-floor boiler room door pushed open.
"... It was a little tense doing a building search for a bear," the post said.
Officers searched the boiler room and found that the bear had made a clean escape through a broken window. The post described it as "just another day at the office for JPD officers. ..."
Stephanie Sell, Alaska Department of Fish and Game area wildlife biologist, said that by the time she arrived at the downtown Juneau apartment, the bear was gone. But before it left, she said, it feasted on garbage. "It was probably fat and happy," she said.
Apartment residents kept garbage cans in the ground-level room, she said, which she advised as long as the doors are kept closed.
Sell said Fish and Game gets reports of bears entering homes "more often than you would think," though the animals often simply walk into an arctic entryway. Bears should go into hibernation in the next couple of weeks, Sell said, and the number of such incidents should shrink.
Until then, the bears will keep eating, and it's important to keep trash secured, Sell said.
Tuesday's news isn't the first wacky bear story out of Juneau this month. Earlier in September, a black bear wandered around the state's capital with a large plastic jar stuck on its head.
Fish and Game staff tranquilized the bear, got the jar off its head and set it loose with unobstructed vision.