It wasn’t the ending that state fish and game officer Bruce Richards had wished for a mother bear and her young cub, cowering up high trees Monday in the Highlands just south of Cougar Mountain.

The bears’ presence was noticed early, around 2 a.m., when a resident heard something rustling around outside. Bears will scavenge for pet food left out overnight or grab at bird feeders. Apples are starting to ripen on trees now, too.

As Claudia Donnelly relates the bears’ story, one of her neighbors got close enough at about 5 a.m. to take pictures of the mother bear and her cub. They were in separate trees.

Monday unfolded with the cub, probably about nine months old, coming down from its perch, running across a pasture and climbing up the tree where its mother waited, scared.

Donnelly’s neighborhood at roughly 148th Avenue Southeast near May Valley is not far from prime bear habitat on Cougar Mountain. The bears have been spotted in the area for some time.

It’s another example of how bears are finding their way into neighborhoods, looking for easy pickings.

Donnelly makes a point about humans’ impact on the bears’ habits and habitat.

“We are invading their territory,” she said.

In the afternoon, Renton police arrived and later game officers with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, including Bruce Richards, who also responded to the bear up a tree in Kennydale earlier this year.

Early in the evening, around 6 p.m., a plan was made to tranquilize the cub and catch it in a net as it fell from the tree. But the drug took effect quicker than expected and the cub fell from the tree before the net was set up to catch it.

On its way down, the cub hit a limb. Not until later, when wildlife officers took the cub to a veterinarian for an exam, did they learn that the cub had broken its jaw in the fall.

Richards said he had a choice to make: Have the vet suture the jaw and return the cub to its mother or do a more permanent repair to the cub’s jaw with a wire.

Richards chose the latter option, although that meant keeping the cub confined for four to six weeks while the jaw healed.

“That changed the whole complexion of the contact,” he said.

The decision meant, too, that the mother bear would remain behind. She was about 60 feet up in the tree, which was considered too high to safely tranquilize her.

Now, the cub is at a Progressive Animal Welfare Society facility, where it is undergoing care. Richards recently brought three other cubs there, all of whom who had lost their mothers.

The plan is for PAWS to care for the cubs and eventually place them in a state of induced hibernation, probably in hay bales, according to Richards. He’ll then take the four cubs into the mountains, where they will continue their hibernation.

The mother bear, at about 200 pounds good-sized for a female, remains in the Highlands. Donnelly said she saw the bear in the neighborhood around 1:15 p.m. on Tuesday.

Richards said it’s probably looking for its cub. It’s unlikely game officers will take an further action about the mother bear.

Richards would have preferred to keep the mother and cub together, but there also is the potential for a positive outcome.

Even if officers had captured the female and released her elsewhere, she probably would have ended up back in Newcastle or east Renton, she said.

The cub probably would have done the same, he said, had it not been captured and eventually moved into the mountains. He could have become a problem in a year or so, on its own, Richards said.

“It will be another bear in Renton and Newscastle that’s going to be a problem,” he said.

It’s unlikely that a bear that age would find its way back to the Cougar Mountain area if moved into the Cascades, he said.

Richards a few months ago released the so-called Kennydale bear into the upper reaches of the Cascades. He’s mum about the exact location.

The bear was equipped with a transmitter, but Richards hasn’t received any signals. It’s possible the bear yanked out the antenna.

He’s not worried about the bear.

“It wasn’t going to die,” he said. “The only thing is whether it got killed.” So far, he hasn’t received any such report.

“My educated guess, he is doing fine,” he said.