Shocking footage captured the moment a Washington State toddler ran towards a black bear in her backyard before her worried mother corraled the child and brought her into the house.
Samantha Martin told KCPQ the scary situation unfolded when her two-year-old toddler Juniper unlocked the back door to their Redmond home while they were watching a movie.
Video of the wild incident, shared on YouTube by Storyful Viral, shows the toddler on the back patio as a small black bear runs across a wall in the backyard.
Samantha walked out the back door and casually told Juniper to “come back inside,” not seeing the bear at the end of the wall.
“That’s a bear!” the toddler screams with delight as she runs toward it with open arms. Martin runs after Juniper, scoops her up, and rushes her back into the home, according to the footage.
“I just panicked. I didn’t really have a lot of thoughts in the moment so much as get the child and get back inside,” Martin told KCPQ.
She noted she was less concerned about the juvenile bear and more worried that its mother was lurking somewhere nearby.
“It was just a little baby bear, but my biggest concern wasn’t necessarily the baby bear so much as I didn’t know where the mom was and didn’t know how she’d feel about two humans running towards her baby,” she told KCPQ.
Juniper loves to furnish her reading skills with her animal identification book, and Martin thinks “she was just excited to see something from her book.”
While in the yard, the animal was chowing down on birdseed and destroyed the family’s feeder in the process. Chase Gunnell, Puget Sound region communications manager of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), said that birdseed could draw bears to homes and recommends against feeding birds in the Spring. Martin does not plan to put her feeder back up in the near future, though she enjoys birds, according to KCPQ.
The WDFW notes the black bear population in Washington is estimated to be between 25,000 and 30,000.
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