LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX NEWS) \u2014 Janel DeBoer had lived in her Fayette County home for 22 years without ever seeing a black bear, until her security camera captured one roaming her yard Monday morning.<\/p>\n
“As soon as I get up, I always check my phone, of course, and I had noticed that the bling was going off in the night, so I pulled it up,” DeBoer said.<\/p>\n
The footage showed a black bear moving through her yard \u2014 something she never expected to see.<\/p>\n
“I looked at it and I went, surely this is not what I’m thinking it is,” DeBoer said.<\/p>\n
The bear walked through a path near her garden but left her tomatoes untouched, leaving only a few small indentations in the ground. A neighbor’s garbage can was not as lucky.<\/p>\n
“I think he emptied my neighbor’s garbage can all over the driveway,” DeBoer said.<\/p>\n
The experience has made DeBoer more cautious, but state bear coordinator John Hast says residents have no reason to panic \u2014 as long as they give the animals space.<\/p>\n
“Let the neighbors know in the area that they’ve got a bear and, you know, we’ve never, we’ve never had any issues out of them up in this neck of the woods,” Hast said.<\/p>\n
Hast says bear sightings in Fayette County are becoming more common, and he believes this is the same bear previously spotted at Masterson Station.<\/p>\n
“I think this is all the same bear that went through Masterson Station,” Hast said.<\/p>\n
Hast says the bear is likely a young male pushed out by older bears during mating season and is now wandering in search of food and new territory.<\/p>\n
“It’s just kind of an evolutionary trait of bears,” Hast said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX NEWS) \u2014 Janel DeBoer had lived in her Fayette County home for 22 years without…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791579,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-791578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791578\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}