INITIAL ALERTWebsite
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Black Bear Spotted Near Campus: A security officer with the Duke University Police Department spotted a black bear walking near the Erwin Road and Fulton Street intersection Monday at approximately 3:23 a.m. The bear walked into the Durham VA Medical Center parking lot, then crossed Erwin Road and entered the woods. The bear has been seen near Duke's Chiller Plant No. 2 on Monday and reported near the Center for Living on Tuesday. If you see a black bear on or near the Duke campus, call Duke Police at (919) 684-2444. Do not approach the animal.
This text has been reconstructed from news coverage and may not reflect the exact original wording.
The 3:23 a.m. sighting time is unusually precise for a wildlife advisory, likely because the reporting officer recorded the exact time in the police incident log, and Duke Today's news article preserved it, giving this case a rarer degree of chronological precision than most wildlife advisories.
The bear's trajectory, from the Duke medical campus property line, through the adjacent Durham VA parking lot, across Erwin Road, and into woods, illustrates how urban black bears use developed land as corridors between forested patches, a well-documented phenomenon in the expanding southeastern US black bear population.
The multi-day nature of the sightings (Monday near Chiller Plant, Tuesday near Center for Living) suggests the animal was a healthy adult bear foraging in the institutional campus area during the summer, when human activity is lower and natural food sources may be limited.