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A two-year-old female black bear seen wandering around Ashland, Wisconsin, for eight days with a plastic jar stuck on her head has been safely freed.
The bear’s nearly 50-mile journey sparked widespread concern and social media attention. Jamie Morey of the Chequamegon Humane Association joined the effort to help after her neighbors alerted her to a sighting, and she spent the week tracking the bear.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources also tracked the bear, eventually locating her in Morey's neighbor's yard in Cable.
Officials tranquilized the bear, removed her from her plastic prison, and returned her to the wild.
"Earlier this week, I was just like, 'There's no way.' I'm like, 'This story is not going to end well,'” Morey told WCCO. “It's not going to be this hero story, and lo and behold, the bear is alive, and it does not have a bucket on its head.”
The rescued bear was underweight at 70 pounds, below the typical 100 to 150 pound range for a bear her age. She was still able to drink with the jar on her head by dunking it in water.
"The good news is this is the time of year when food is the most abundant in the woods, and she's got two months to kind of get back into healthy shape going into winter, so she's certainly got a good chance," Randy Johnson, a large carnivore specialist with the Wisconsin DNR, told the outlet.
Officials tagged the bear with two plastic ear markers for identification and thanked the public for reporting sightings during her journey across the northern region of the state.
Johnson said animals often get objects stuck on their heads from digging through trash. Officials urge residents who live near bear habitats to secure their garbage.
