When a bear paid a surprise visit to the Shawano County Library, book jokes started to stack up

SHAWANO - Did you hear the one about the bear that dropped by the Shawano County Library on Monday afternoon?

Seems it got word out in the wild that this year’s theme for the summer reading program is “Adventure Begins at Your Library” (no, really) and decided to do his part.

It worked.

“Really on theme,” said Nancy Bell, Shawano County Libary director. “It really does start here.”

A young black bear spotted making the rounds in Shawano for a good chunk of the day on Monday, likely in search of lunch, didn’t find it at the library, but its unexpected visit to the front entrance is the kind of stuff you could spin an entire storytime out of.

Bell was at a library board meeting at the Tigerton branch when she got a text message from the staff. “The bear! It’s here!” She knew it wasn’t a joke, because it came with a photo that showed the bear by the book return out front.

We interrupt this meeting agenda for breaking bear news.

The photo by Lt. Mike Musolff of the Shawano Police Department, which had been following the bear to make sure it was headed back out of town, captured the animal in a way that it looks like it’s casually leaving its neighborhood library just like a person would. All it was missing was maybe a Paddington Bear hat and a book bag.

“Just a brief stop here as he was wandering by,” Bell said.

When the library shared the photo on its Facebook page with a caption that read “We had a BEARy cute visitor today,” the real bear fun began. There are puns about "liBEARians." Someone shared a photo of the children’s book “Bears Don’t Read.” Maybe he was there to check out "Winnie-the-Pooh," someone else suggested.

“We’re all making jokes about if he was returning his books on time or if he was trying to avoid fines,” Bell said. “Or if someone was going to try to return their stuff and they said, ‘But there was a bear so I couldn’t.’”

Even Bell, who is relatively new to Shawano County bear sightings since becoming director in September, couldn’t resist sharing it on her own Facebook page: "Another thing they don’t teach you in library school ...”

'He was checking every bird feeder in town'

Musolff thinks the bear is likely a year old, one of last year’s cubs sent off to be on its own by its mom.

“Then he decided to go try to find where he could get some food, and he was checking every bird feeder in town,” he said. “He was getting followed around by cars everywhere. He was probably like, ‘This is ridiculous.’ But he stayed in town for the whole day.”

By mid-afternoon, the bear had traveled back out of the city, Musolff said. Bears often wander into town at night to forage for food "and all of sudden, it becomes daylight and there’s people everywhere and they’re like, ‘Wait a minute.’”

It’s best for people to just let bears be and they’ll leave on their own, he said.

“The most important message is if there’s small cubs, stay away from them, because the mom’s not far behind and that will cause an issue. That’s when you really need to worry about these bears is when you get between the mom and the cubs,” he said.

“In this situation, this one was all on his own. He walked within 10 feet of me and just looked at me like, ‘What?’ I said, ‘You need to get out of the city.’"

But not before his drama-free library moment has made a lot of people smile.

“We are having a great time seeing how widespread news of the library bear is getting out there, watching the Facebook posts and interacting with people on it,” Bell said.

Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or [email protected]. Follow her on X @KendraMeinert. 

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Shawano library bear becomes a hit around and online