LIVERMORE FALLS — A mother bear with a serious birdseed addiction finally came “home” from the wild to the place she’d first been captured at earlier this spring, much to the surprise of Kelli Gats.

Gats, who lives at 293 Goding Road, and the bear, known as New Hampshire bear 299 because it originated in New Hampshire, spotted each other at the same time at about 7 a.m. and only a few feet away. A glass door separated them.

The startled bear took off for the neighbor David Mercier’s yard at 280 Goding Road; the startled Gats took off to find her husband, William, who’d arrived home from shift work at Verso Paper in Jay shortly before 7 and went to bed.

“My wife said, ‘Bill! There’s a bear outside!,'” he said. “We took our birdfeeders in like we were told, but the bear came back anyways,” William Gats said. “It’s amazing that where it got trapped here this spring and they took it to northern Maine and it came back.”