A wild grizzly dragged a woman from her tent while she was sleeping last Tuesday night and mauled her to death, according to authorities.
65-year-old Leah Davis from Chico, California, was on a cycling trip when she was torn apart by the bear in Ovando, Montana
The attack happened at around 3:30 a.m. before fellow campers were able to use bear spray to chase off the wild animal.
According to officials from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP) the beast had previously walked around the area at 3 am but it ran away after waking the three campers, who took out food supplies from their tents, put them in a safe place, and went back to sleep.
Half an hour later, the bear was caught on CCTV less than a block away from a post office that was near the camping site. Reports say that the bear also entered another property and ate a few live chickens.
The grizzly has not yet been captured but will eventually be killed.
Wildlife services are still searching for a grizzly bear which killed a camper in Ovando.https://t.co/BsMZ6QEhmE
— Daily Express (@Daily_Express) July 9, 2021
The area will be monitored closely and efforts to find the bear are now focusing on traps near Ovando, officials added.
“At this point, our best chance for catching this bear will be culvert traps set in the area near the chicken coop where the bear killed and ate several chickens,” said Randy Arnold, FWP regional supervisor in Missoula.
The woman was a nurse who worked at a Chico hospital and had been preparing for the trip for months, said Mary Flowers, a friend of hers.
“She loved these kinds of adventures. A woman in her 60s, and she’s dong this kind of stuff — she had a passion for life that was out of the ordinary,” Flowers said.
Samples from the bear’s DNA were also collected at the scene of the attack and officials said if it is caught in one of their traps, the DNA can immediately be compared to check whether it is the same grizzly.
There has been a rise in grizzly bear attacks in the Northern Rockies over the last 10 years as the protected species moved to new areas and the number of people buying houses in the region rose. Unfortunately, that also gave a rise in calls from officials for the bears to be hunted…
North Ovando is home to an estimated 1,000 grizzly bears.
Fatal attacks are not common. There’s been a total of three in the past two decades, including Tuesday’s attack, as per U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
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