photo: Instagram @tastebyspellbound
A hungry black bear broke into the garage of a Connecticut bakery, frightened several employees and served himself 60 cupcakes before fleeing.
Workers at Taste by Spellbound in Avon were loading donuts onto a delivery truck on Wednesday when a bear appeared. The state’s environment agency says there are between 1,000 and 1,200 black bears living in Connecticut, and they were seen in 158 of the state’s 169 towns last year.
The owner of the bakery is Miriam Stephens, who wrote in an Instagram post that she heard employee Maureen Williams “scream bloody murder” and scream that there was a bear in the garage.
Williams told television station WTNH that she screamed to scare the bear away but then backed off three times.
Williams said the bear attacked her, so she backed out of the garage and ran.
Surveillance video obtained by WTNH shows bakery workers walking around the side of the business trying to scare the bear away, but running away after it spooks them.
The video shows the bear dragging a container of cupcakes from the garage into the parking lot. Stephens said the bear ate 60 candies.
Williams said the baker was finally able to drive the bear away.
The four-legged thief was gone by the time the police and the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection arrived.
No one was harmed in the encounter – it happened in a disturbing series of interactions between black bears and humans in Connecticut.
A 74-year-old woman was bitten on her arms and legs last month when she was attacked by a bear while walking her dog in a suburb of Hartford, in the first such attack this year. There were two attacks last year, one in October in which a 10-year-old boy was blown up in the yard.
“The frequency and intensity of bear-human interactions is increasing,” DEEP spokesman Paul Kopelman said Friday.
Statistics compiled by the department showed that there were 67 reports of bears entering Connecticut homes in 2022. The previous record was 45 in 2020.
On Friday, a bear cub wandered into a neighborhood near downtown Hartford and climbed a tree. The locals were excited and surprised, saying that it was unusual for bears to come to town. Police, animal control officers, and state environmental officials responded, creating a spectacle for several hours.
The authorities eventually pacified the little bear and planned to relocate him. Its destination is not disclosed.
