A surveillance video of three black bears in a pizza restaurant near Rocky Mountain National Park is making the rounds on the web and in social media.
The restaurant is Antonio’s Real New York Pizza in Estes Park, Colorado, and though I live in Gulfport, Mississippi, I’m familiar with Antonio’s.
My nephew and his bride had Antonio’s pizza for their wedding rehearsal dinner this summer at the Rustic Ace, best known for its cozy vacation cabins. I was there with my wife for the dinner and the wedding.
My brother and I were the delivery boys, and there was so much pizza, the leftovers the next day could have fed bears.
I saw elks lodging outside the American Legion post at lunch time in Estes Park, but I never saw bears until my brother shared the restaurant’s surveillance video on Facebook on Oct. 8th.
Google shows pages of links to stories about the video, which involved a mother bear and her two cubs breaking into the restaurant and feasting on dough and salami on Oct. 8th just after midnight, when the restaurant was closed.
Some stories played up the cute angle.
For example, the Huff Post headline was “3 Bears Break Into Colorado Restaurant, Find No Porridge” and the deckhead was “The salami, however, was juuuuust right.”
HuffPost used the label “Weird News” above the story.
The best coverage came from The Kansas City Star.
The lead: “Oh look, another bear story out of Colorado, where bears have been walking into people’s garages, breaking into homes, lumbering into hotel lobbies and basically getting way too close to humans.”
I detect the sarcasm of stop the presses in that sentence, but the article is much more than just “another bear story out of Colorado.”
It a serious in-depth look at a growing problem in Colorado cities: “Bears struggling to find food in their own neighborhoods are looking for food among humans.”
The mother and her cubs escaped, and the restaurant owner said on Facebook that “I really hope they went right into hibernation to avoid the department of wildlife.”
Last year, 334 bears were killed — 66 by state wildlife officials, The Denver Post reported this summer.
Alligator stories are always big in my part of the world, so if three gators ever break into a South Mississippi pizza restaurant, stop the presses. Really.
