FLORENCE — One minute Sam Rizzo was riding her bicycle to work in the darkness before dawn. The next, she says, she was fleeing a black bear.
Rizzo woke up early Saturday, hopped on her bike and began pedaling to her early shift at the Hampshire Regional YMCA in Northampton.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary as she rode from her home on Brookside Circle in Florence and turned onto Acrebrook Drive.
“Then, I felt a huge push,” she said. “I thought I hit a pothole.” The impact knocked her off her bike. When she looked up, “there was the black bear.”
“I don’t know if it was an accident, but it was like the bear didn’t really see me until I was on the ground,” Rizzo recalled. Unsure what to do, she said she slowly backed away from the animal, got on her bike and began to ride away.
“Then it started chasing me,” she said. “I am a marathon/half marathon runner and I didn’t have a problem (fleeing) from it. But never in my life would I have thought to be that close to a bear.”
Rizzo recounted her experience in a Facebook post and in interviews by phone and Facebook email. She said the bear gave chase briefly but she soon got away, left with a sore shoulder from the fall — and a story to share.
“I am good, shoulder hurts, but wow if you wanted to be close up to a bear, I think I nailed that one for sure!” Rizzo wrote on Facebook.
Northampton Police said Saturday afternoon they had not received a report of a bear sighting.
“I didn’t report it to animal control because I didn’t want them to shoot it, since I think it was an accident,” Rizzo said by email. “I believe since it was so dark that the bear and I bumped into each other.”
Though the physical encounter was a shock for Rizzo, seeing a bear in the region is far from unusual. In July, the Gazette reported the number of bears in Massachusetts has grown more than tenfold in recent decades.
The population has jumped from about 400 bears in the 1970s to a current population of 5,000, biologist Ralph Taylor, who manages the Connecticut Valley Wildlife District, said then.
According to Taylor, that number will continue to grow until the environment is no longer able to sustain the population.
Nonetheless, the number of bear reports to Northampton police dropped from 64 to 42 between 2014 and 2015, according to police records.
As of July, there had been 21 bear reports in 2016.
Those numbers were considerably higher in 2011 and 2012, at 71 and 88 reports, respectively. The number of reported incidents, however, plummeted to 19 in 2013. Neither Taylor nor the police could offer an explanation for that sharp decline.
To curb local bear encounters, Northampton adopted a city ordinance in 2012 that prohibits feeding wildlife, excluding bird feeders.
Staff writers Jeffrey Good and Michael Majchrowicz contributed reporting.