A black bear has been captured after three days roaming Yonkers, 12 miles north of midtown Manhattan.
Police in the city captured and tranquilized the bear, which weighed 200lb (14 stone or 90kg), as it sat in a tree, following what the New York Daily News described as its “three-day scamper” through Yonkers.
It fell 25ft from the tree on to cushioned pads at around 3am, WABC reported.
The bear was first spotted a few days ago along the Bronx River parkway, and at around 11pm on Tuesday night a homeowner reported that it was rifling through her trashcan.
The police confined the bear in the backyard, at which point it climbed a tree.
“A bear is nothing more than a large raccoon,” Tom Koepf of the New York state department of environmental conservation told WABC.
“If there’s food out, they’re going to eat it; they’re just scavengers. You’ve got to have your garbage clean, you can’t have bird-feeders in your yard, you don’t want the bears coming through.”
The bear was taken to the department of conservation headquarters in New Paltz, further up the Hudson river, and will be released into the Cranberry mountain state forest in Putnam County, the TV station reported.
Correction, 20 May 2015: The bear was found about 12 miles from midtown Manhattan, not 15 miles from Manhattan as was originally reported. This has been corrected.
