A grizzly bear that wandered into the Silverbrook Estates subdivision on the north end of Kalispell Monday night got lots of attention, but it moved on without incident and is still being pursued by state wildlife officials.

Kalispell Police were notified of the bear’s presence off Church Drive at about 8:40 p.m.

“We did have a number of officers in the Silverbrook Estates area. We were monitoring the bear,” Patrol Captain Tim Falkner said. “We tried to make people aware that the bear was in the area — and most people were aware.”

The bear sauntered through the subdivision to the west and eventually moved into the Stillwater River corridor. Officers were on the scene for just over an hour. 

“At one point we had officers within 100 yards of the bear, but it didn’t seem to care that we were there at all. It just kept moving out of the neighborhood,” Falkner said. “It doesn’t appear it got into any mischief in the area overnight.”

Tim Manley, a grizzly bear management specialist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, has been trying to catch up to the bear for several days.

He said it was first reported in the Smith Lake area on Friday. The next day it was seen in the Stone Ridge subdivision off Ashley Creek, where Manley deployed a trap to capture it.

The bear is wearing a collar, and Manley has gathered frequencies from bear managers as far away as the Rocky Mountain Front on Montana’s east side in an attempt to identify “who” the bear is, and what its history is.

So far, no signals from the collar have been detected.

“We’ve tried all the frequencies that we have access to and it’s possible the collar battery has gone dead,” he said.

Manley said he believes the bear was feeding on abundant serviceberries in the Ashley Creek drainage and it is probably doing the same in the Stillwater River corridor.

“It has traveled about six miles in the last two days,” Manley said. “It hasn’t done anything. It hasn’t been aggressive. It hasn’t gotten into anything.”

But to make sure that it avoids the many attractants in its current surroundings, Manley is still attempting to trap the bear so it can be relocated.

The owner of a property off the Stillwater River and Church Drive reported seeing the bear Tuesday morning, and Manley got permission to set up a trap on nearby land.

In other bear news, a grizzly bear was relocated from the Blackfeet Reservation to the North Fork Flathead River drainage.

The grizzly bear was captured at the site of a calf depredation on the reservation near the Alberta border. The bear didn’t have any previous history of conflicts. It was fitted with a radio collar and moved to the Whale Creek drainage in the North Fork.