Wildlife officers with the Arizona Game and Fish Department have tranquilized and captured a bear and her two cubs in a town about 55 miles north of Phoenix.
When a Crown King resident flagged them down Sunday afternoon, patrolling officers found three bears getting into the garbage in his garage.
During the capture, one cub climbed a power pole before getting tangled in phone wires and falling asleep. It took an APS employee and a bucket truck from Prescott to extract the cub and lower it to the ground, away from the electrical equipment it had climbed up near.
The trio had been spotted before over the past couple months, getting more comfortable with frequenting human-developed areas but not acting aggressively toward people.
The bear and one cub were released at an approved site in a remote area Monday. But the other is being treated for a previous infection in one leg at a wildlife rehabilitation center.
