- A group of California residents found a family of bears hibernating under their home.
- Nonprofit organization BEAR League wrote about the incident in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
- The group said the occupants of the home had been hearing "snoring-like noises" during the winter.
After hearing noises all winter, some California residents discovered a family of five bears was hibernating under their house.
The BEAR League, a nonprofit organization that says on its website that its mission is to help people live "in harmony" with bears, detailed the incident in a Facebook post on Tuesday. According to the post, residents of the home had been hearing "odd rumbling, snoring-like noises" throughout the winter. It was not clear from the league's post whether the residents of the home were a family.
When the bears woke up, the human occupants of the home could "no longer deny there was probably a bear under the house," the organization wrote. The BEAR League was brought in to "un-invite" the mother bear, only to be surprised by four cubs also living under the house, according to the Facebook post.
The group said on Facebook that the mother bear had three cubs last year before adopting an orphaned cub nine months later; when it came time to hibernate for winter, the bear family entered an unsecured crawl space opening and settled in.
The organization also noted that neighbors of the home said the occupants were "imagining" the noises because they didn't hear anything.
BEAR League's Executive Director Ann Bryant told HuffPost's Hilary Hanson that the process of getting the bears to vacate the area entailed "being territorial and scary, thereby making the bear believe it's not going to be safe there anymore." HuffPost added that Bryant said volunteers never harm bears physically but that "sometimes we do hurt their feelings."
After the bears left the house, the league watched as the family regrouped on the other side of a fence and went on their way, according to the nonprofit's Facebook post. Bryant told HuffPost that "an electrical barrier" was installed in the crawl space to give a small shock to any bears trying to enter.
Bryant also told the outlet that her organization is "kept very busy" by bears living under crawl space, and often removes several bears a day. She said about 100 to 150 bears attempt to hibernate under homes in the Lake Tahoe area every winter, but the problem can be easily solved.
"People really need to make sure their crawl space openings are closed and secured before bears go inside... especially in the fall, when they are looking for hibernation dens," she told HuffPost.