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http://www.wsbt.com/news/local/notoroious-...n-city/33797760

MICHIGAN CITY -

Shaniqua Lambert watched with excitement and shock as a very healthy looking black bear still roaming the Michigan City area gorged from her trash can filled with turkey bones and other food scraps.
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There were also empty bottles of honey and guava nectar in the can along with Popsicle sticks available, perhaps, for dessert.

She and her husband, Leon, stood for about a minute watching the bear illuminated by a porch light before it headed back off into the woods along U.S. 20 near a heavily used public access fishing site at Trail Creek just east of Johnson Rd.

''He was nibbling on leftovers from my four-year-olds. There's always something sweet in there,'' said Lambert.

It was the first reported sighting of the bear in about a week and four days after a honey maker about a mile to the north on Warnke Road had his bee hives toppled over for the second time.

Lambert said she was lying down just after midnight Friday when she heard some loud banging as if a burglar was going through stuff inside her garage.

She opened the curtain and saw the bear, then yelled at her husband who raced to the screen door just ten feet away from the bear looking right at home picking through the trash in their driveway.

''He was shiny and looked very healthy. His tongue was very moist. That's how much I saw,'' said Mrs. Lambert.

Leon was flipping the porch light on and off to try and scare it when the bear made its way around their detached garage and back into the woods, leaving a trail of prints in the soft ground.

There were also prints and scratch marks on two garbage cans and a single print was discovered on a dusty golf car parked in the garage left open.

The property is owned by Ted Woodard, who came out and speculated the bear was in the garage trying to find some mouse traps baited with peanut butter.

''It's just nature. You see deer. You see fox. You see all of the good stuff out here but bears, you wouldn't expect to see something like that,'' said Woodard.

Shaniqua estimated the bear weighed roughly 250 pounds.

She said the bear also looked wet, possibly from the dew in the brush and on the ground or from wading through Trail Creek -- a popular spot for anglers fishing for trout and salmon that runs a just a stone's throw from their residence.

''If I had to guess I would say he had just gotten out of the water. That's how shiny he was and he looked like he was smiling. He was very comfortable,'' Shaniqua said.

The bear also toppled the garbage cans at a house just over 100 feet away and a block of the north along Menke Road.

Indiana Department of Natural Resources conservation officer Shawn Brown said there's been no change in the strategy of monitoring the bear's activity since the first tracks were spotted two weeks ago a few miles east of Michigan City.

Ever since, all of the other sightings and evidence of a bear have come from within a one or two mile radius, except for tracks discovered several miles to the north close to some blueberry fields just south of the Michigan line.

Experts are confident the bear will eventually make the 200 mile trip back to the Muskegon area where the first sighting was reported nearly two months ago because July 1 is the start of mating season.

If that day comes, some people might be sad to say farewell to the bear given the amount of interest and enthusiasm brought out by the first confirmed bear in Indiana since 1871.

''It's a very interesting topic of discussion that we would have a bear here in Indiana and it's something people have been following,'' said Brown.