You’d have to be CRAZY to waddle into a tight, dark crawlspace with a massive black bear.
Well, color this California man crazy, because that’s exactly what he did, and there’s video to prove it. Toogee Sielsch set up a trail camera just outside of the opening to the crawlspace to track the whereabouts of the bear, and when he knew the big beast was in there, he chose to go in after it.
Sielsch was armed, but not in the way you feel like you should be if you were about to come face to face with an apex predator. The nature enthusiast went flashlight and paintball-gun-blazing into the crawlspace, and it’s as terrifying as you would imagine it to be.
You wouldn’t be able to tell though based on how cool and collected Sielsh is about it all. He squeezes through the opening in the wall, and within seconds, he’s firing off the paintball gun. It doesn’t take long for a hefty 500-pound (at least) black bear to come pouring out of the same hole in the wall that the man had just carefully crawled through.
The footage is almost hard to believe, but I guess that’s what you get when you take an over-confident California man, arm him with a paintball gun, and give him the task of evicting a squatting black bear.
Sielsch posted the trail cam video onto his Instagram account, and shared this message along with it:
“I’ve got good news, and tough love news. I found B33, who I haven’t seen since early November. YAY! Then I had to evict him from under an occupied house that he ripped into. Boo!
I promise he’s just fine, and will surely find another safer spot to over winter. Don’t even THINK about doing what I did there unless you have YEARS of training and experience!”
Just a side note, is it possible to have years of experience using a paintball gun to force black bears out of crawlspaces?
If you ask me, that seems like an oddly specific thing to be experienced in. However, if that statement by Sielsch is true, he could not have been more ready for this moment. Maybe that’s why he was so calm about going into the crawlspace…
