A fur shop in Aspen, Colorado, served as the backdrop for an unusual paparazzi scene one Saturday night. The two characters in the drama: a bear, and a man bent on photographing the bear.

A man, an amateur wildlife photographer, closely pursued the bear with a cell-phone camera. A store employee said he suspects the man hazed the bear into the fur shop, that the bear entered the store to avoid the man and that the man was at fault in this case, not the bear.

“It was as though this guy was hypnotized by the bear,” said Mark Goodman, who was working in the fur shop when the bear showed up. “I kept telling [the man] to please leave the store, please leave the bear alone, and he just wouldn’t respond.”

The bear walked in the front door of Mark Richards Fine Outerwear about 9:30 p.m. and was in the shop for only a few minutes, Goodman said. The docile bear walked between racks of fur coats and through mannequined display cases, but damaged little. “

He wasn’t grazing, he was just browsing,” Goodman said. “But it could have been a lot worse. Even though he was a small bear, one swipe of his paw and he could have done tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage.”

The Aspen Police Department has been inundated with bear reports this summer. The department responded to 26 calls on bears from Thursday, Aug. 6 to Sunday, Aug. 9. “That’s a fairly large number,” said APD community safety officer Dave Paschal. “We’ve been busy with bears this summer, that’s for sure.”

Paschal said the department has received more reports of bears breaking in to homes this summer than in years past, probably because garbage is less available. And since there’s less garbage available, he’s hoping the bears will soon turn to more natural food sources. He’s noticed serviceberries ripening near his house, seen “more seeds in scat around town,” and thinks the bears will move to higher country with the influx of ripe berries. But the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Randy Hampton said that even though the bears’ natural food supply is ripening, the bruins aren’t likely to leave Aspen.

“The rainy spring gave us a relatively good berry crop,” he said. “The challenge this year is that we have a large number of bears that have become so habituated to the availability of trash and other human food sources that they’ve integrated it into their habitat.”

And with bears getting more comfortable in town, they’re more likely to come into contact with humans. Hampton said that Saturday evening’s fur shop incident is an example of people behaving poorly around bears.

“People are putting themselves and others at risk when they mess with bears,” Hampton said. “You’d think that would be enough, without having the Division of Wildlife baby-sitting everybody in town.”

“It’s the bear paparazzi that are endangering our bears,” Goodman added.—courtesy Aspen Daily News