Tyndall Air Force Base on the Florida Panhandle may want to rethink security measures, after a bear was recorded easily topping the facility’s barbed-wire security fence.
Kevin Dalrymple shared the video Aug. 10 on Facebook, showing the bear climbed up one side of the fence, stepped over the barbed wire, then backed down the other side.
It takes just 24 seconds.
“How a bear climbs a fence at Tyndall,” Dalrymple wrote. “This little guy is part of a family of bears that we see regularly on the base.”
Tyndall is southeast of Panama City and encompasses 29,000 acres of land that was originally “pine and palmetto trees, scrub brush, and swamps.”
Dalrymple recorded the video the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 9, as he drove past the base. The bear is seen disappearing into a wooded area on the base, sporting a slight limp. (Some guessed that might be because it stepped on one of the fence barbs.)
The video had racked up more than 400,000 views as of Aug. 12, and prompted 1,400 reactions and comments. This includes some who noted the bear might be reclaiming its ancestral home. A few joked it was a “spy bear.”
“That’s not his first time to climb that fence,” Tracy Stephens Archer said.
“That bear had to have been to prison,” Kevin Green Jr. wrote.
“They are definitely problem solvers,” Bill Payne posted. “I put locks on the front of my garbage cans so they figured out to just pull the plastic pins out of the back. Smart animals.”
Black bears are native to Florida and common along the western part of the Panhandle, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Adult males average about 450 pounds, though one weighing 760 pounds was captured in 2015, the state reports.
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