A black bear was seen in Philomath early Wednesday morning near Chapel Drive and Willowbrook Drive. (Photo by Canva)

A black bear headed in the direction of Philomath Middle School from Chapel Drive was spotted early Wednesday morning.

“We got a report that somebody saw it crossing Chapel near Willowbrook and it was headed kind of in a northwesterly direction,” Philomath Police Chief Dave Gurski said about a call to police that came in at around 5:30 a.m. “We notified the school district just because of the close proximity to the middle school and then also the park. But we haven’t had any more sightings (as of 11:20 a.m. Wednesday).”

Gurski reached out to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and talked to a wildlife biologist.

“He basically said that if it’s not getting into garbages or being a nuisance, then there really wasn’t a whole lot we can do,” Gurski said. “We haven’t had any additional sightings today or later this morning, so there’s just the one call, one sighting.”

A police officer finishing up his overnight shift responded.

“He was out patrolling the area, looking to see if he could spot it,” Gurski said. “More than anything, if we did spot it, to keep it out of residential neighborhoods and things like that but it was never spotted again.”

The rare occurrence of a bear sighting in town coincides with a black bear that was spotted in central and west Corvallis early Sunday morning. According to that agency’s social media post, the bear was last seen at around 8 p.m. headed west out of town near the Oregon State University dairy fields.

Gurski said he was waiting for literature from ODFW in case information needs to be posted publicly about what to do if another bear sighting occurs in a residential area.

“In a nutshell, what he told me was if we did have additional sightings in a neighborhood, then the advisement would be for residents to bring their garbages inside, keep pets inside and then any food or water that might be outside for their pets, to bring that inside so there wasn’t anything to attract the bear in the area,” Gurski said. 

Gurski could recall only one other time that an in-town bear sighting had come in.

“In the last 20 years, I’m only aware of one other one and it came into the west part of town and we were able to get it out of town,” Gurski said. “It was kind of pushed out Highway 34 and then out Old Peak but that was over 10 years ago.”

The police department said it will get back on bear watch if another sighting occurs.

“Obviously, we’ll ramp things up if we get another sighting with regards to notifications and things like,” Gurski said. “I’m hoping that it’s moved out of the area and hopefully out into a less-populated area of the county.”

Brad Fuqua has covered the Philomath area since 2014 as the editor of the now-closed Philomath Express and currently as publisher/editor of the Philomath News. He has worked as a professional journalist since 1988 at daily and weekly newspapers in Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota, Arizona, Montana and Oregon.

3 replies on “Rare black bear sighting occurs in Philomath”

  1. Is the photo of the bear in your news article a picture of the actual bear that has been sighted?

    1. Hi Carol: I wondered if somebody would have that thought. No, I wish I had a photo of the actual bear but it’s a file photo from a photo service that I use just to have some sort of image with the story (if you take another look, the caption includes the photo credit to Canva).

  2. I’m an OSU student and there was a black bear on campus last weekend, very unusual indeed.

Comments are closed.