Train Engineer Spots Black Bear Near Wisconsin Border
(CBS) -- It's something you might expect to see in Montana - or even in northern Wisconsin, but a black bear in Illinois? A locomotive engineer says he's sure he saw one last Tuesday.
Train engineer Andrew Taylor said he saw the bear around 8:20 p.m. last Tuesday, on a railroad line about 10 miles south of the Illinois-Wisconsin border.
"I was rather dumbfounded at that particular moment. I thought, no way. There's not a bear in northern Illinois. Not a chance," Taylor said.
But then after the train pulled into Chicago, Taylor said he became more convinced he had seen a black bear.
"I did some Googling around, and there have been a lot of bear sightings - increased bear sightings - in southeast Wisconsin," he said.
A spokesman for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources said Illinois does not have a population of black bears, but he it would be within the realm of possibility to have a lone bear walking the rail line into Illinois, at least temporarily.
LISTEN: WBBM Newsradio's Steve Miller reports
