Little bursts of sound — police sirens and barking dogs — woke Fred Garcia before dawn Tuesday morning in his home in a neighborhood adjacent to DeVargas Center. He and his wife looked out their second-story bedroom window on Villeros Street and saw a shadow across the street near his neighbor's boat.

"I thought someone was trying to break into his house," Garcia said, adding that he heard city police telling people to stay inside.

Then, "Lo and behold, it was a big brown bear," Garcia said. "It came out and just strolled across my neighbor's yard and along the road. The police had spotlights on him. He wasn't scared at all. He just strutted his stuff and went across St. Francis (Drive).

"I bet when it stood up it was almost seven feet tall," he added. "I have a Rottweiler and he looked like a puppy next to that big thing."

A day later, on Wednesday, a New Mexico Department of Game and Fish game warden darted and removed a bear at Alamo Drive and St. Francis in the Casa Solana neighborhood. No one knows if it is the same bear Garcia and his neighbors saw.

It isn't unusual to see bears in Northern New Mexico towns in the fall, even in cities the size of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Lance Cherry, a public information officer for the Department of Game and Fish, said the Santa Fe office receives five to 10 calls a week about bears in the autumn and twice that many in the spring, when the animals are hungry after a long winter's nap.

Bears use arroyos and wooded open spaces to slip through towns, often unnoticed. In the fall, they're looking for trash, birdseed, fruit, dog food and any other edibles so they can pack on the pounds before hibernation.

Even in New Mexico towns not so close to big mountains, such as Wagon Mound, a hamlet along Interstate 25 on the edge of the Great Plains, bears are fairly common. However, they aren't usually as big as the one Game and Fish officers caught in Wagon Mound Thursday: a 400-pound-plus plus male bear that ended up wedged between two houses. Officer Curtis Coburn had to walk between the two houses to get close enough to dart the bear.

Usually it takes only one or two medicated darts before a bear is out like a light, said Sgt. Rey Sanchez of Game and Fish. But it took three to begin lulling this bear to sleep, and three more before the bear was asleep enough to safely be tagged, loaded into a trailer, and transported to a new home in the Carson National Forest.

"This bear is definitely one of the larger bears I've seen," Sanchez said. "But it was a very docile, mellow bear. It was never aggressive."

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.