Aurora ‘bearly” survives the weekend

It was a memorable weekend in Aurora, as the excitement of seeing a bear in the wild came to town Saturday, May 18.
The bear, who the Missouri Conservation office estimated was around four-years old, was first spotted early Saturday morning when an Aurora resident noticed a bear in a tree in a backyard at the intersection of Rinker and St. Louis streets in the middle of Aurora.
Aurora police marked the area with police tape, as onlookers flocked to the unlikely scene, and took shifts maintaining the crowd and keeping an eye on the animal.
Aurora police said the Missouri Department of Conservation would be sending a specialist to the scene but admitted that could possibly not occur until the next morning.
The bear spent nearly 14 hours in the tree, only coming down once to relocate to another tree nearby. Eventually, however, the bear did make his way southeast overnight to a backyard between Glendale and Kirkwood streets, where the Missouri Department of Conservation agents set a trap at the bottom of the tree he was perched in and waited. A check on Monday morning found the area cleared with both conservation agents and the wild animal nowhere to be found.