LIVERMORE – When a mama bear and her 80-pound yearlings became a nuisance, the state set out to move them back to the wild.

After being trapped over the weekend by state biologists, the sow was moved to the woods, away from people. One yearling is being rehabilitated to survive in the wild; the other ran away and is believed to be safe in the woods.

The mother bear, fed by people in New Hampshire and Maine, had been raiding bird feeders and damaging property.

“This bear is a bird-feeder bear,” said Deborah Turcotte, spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “She has been raised eating birdseed.”

She was trapped twice in New Hampshire and moved to northern New Hampshire, away from people, Turcotte said. The bear, with her cubs, followed the Androscoggin River to Livermore last year, she said.

When the bears emerged from hibernation this spring, they appeared on Crash and Goding roads and began to visit bird feeders.

Wardens asked people to take in their feeders. Some did; some didn’t, Turcotte said.

Some people enjoyed seeing the creatures, but others were fearful as the bears continued to come close to residences to look for food, she said.

The bears became a problem.

John Wakefield of Hathaway Road in Livermore went to let his barking dog out at 3 a.m. recently, but luckily, he said, he first decided to turn the light on. Through the glass doors he could see a bear on its hind legs reaching up for his bird feeders 5½ feet above his deck.

“If I was a drinking man, I would have quit drinking,” Wakefield said.

The mama bear knocked the bird feeder down but it landed between the grill and the railing.

It didn’t like that, he said.

He shut the light off and kept watching. The bear struggled with the bird feeder and knocked some sunflower seeds out. After five minutes it sauntered off.

On the way up to the deck, the bear had damaged a gate used to keep dogs from leaving the deck, Wakefield said.

“I’ve seen a lot of things here – deer, raccoon and moose. I honestly thought: Am I dreaming?” he said. “It was a good-sized bear, a beautiful animal.”

Next year, the bird feeders are coming in early, he said.

Bait set

Kelli Gats let the traps be set up in her yard on Goding Road. She was concerned not because she was afraid, she said, but because the bears had become a nuisance and someone might shoot them. She has nothing against hunting, she said, and if it was in season, it would have been OK.

She brought in her bird feeders last fall when the bears went after them and tossed around garbage. This year, she didn’t put them out when she heard the bears were still around.

One day, she went out to go to work and there was a bear sitting in her driveway.

“She never appeared to be aggressive,” Gats said. “We just knew they were around.”

She and her youngest daughter, Erin, 14, watched the bears as they went near the traps set about 50 yards from the house. The traps looked like big culverts, maybe a little larger than a garbage can. Food was set on the floor and in a bucket. Once in, the bear’s weight springs the door shut.

“We got a close look at the bears, our noses were pressed against the screen,” Gats said. “The Yankees-Red Sox game actually took a back seat to the bears. I love baseball, but it is something we have never seen before, and it is probably something we’ll never see again.”