A bear might be roaming North Whidbey.

An anonymous resident posted a Ring Camera video on the Neighbors app which shows a bear lumbering through a yard at about 6 p.m. on Nov. 2. The map accompanying the video identifies the location roughly as the Cascade Place area off of East Troxell Road.

Ralph Downes, an enforcement officer for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, said he hasn’t receive any reports of a bear on Whidbey Island, but he surmises that it’s probably real. The video can be viewed at neighbors.ring.com/n/VyP7jlEfpZ.

“That certainly looks like a healthy black bear,” he said, acknowledging that the animal appears to be pretty chunky.

Downes joked that the island was due for a bear, since one has showed up every two years since 2019. Prior to that, no bears had been seen on Whidbey Island for many decades.

Yet Downes said this is an unusual time of the year for a bear to make an appearance. The last three times that bears came to the island, they were young males looking for ursine love in the spring or early summer months.

The bear that swam from Camano Island to Whidbey in 2019 made an epic trip through Whidbey before making his way across Deception Pass to Fidalgo Island. From there, he swam to Guemes, Cyprus, Blakely, Orcas, Shaw, San Juan, Lopez and Decatur islands before returning to the mainland. He ended up in a tree next to the Home Depot in Burlington, where wildlife officials trapped and returned him to the Cascade Mountains in Snohomish County.

Two years ago, a bear was spotted not far from Walmart in Oak Harbor after hanging out in the Strawberry Point area of North Whidbey. At the time, Downes said people had no reason to be worried and that the big guy was probably just passing through. Sure enough, no further reports were made as the bear presumably returned to a more suitable location.

Downes said it’s hard to know how long the current bear might have been on the island since they tend to be “stealthy and secretive.” At the same time, a black bear’s craving for easy food often gets the best of them, so he expects the bear might get into bird feeders or garbage cans sooner or later.