SANTA FE – Shannon Mullens was driving from Red River, New Mexico to Oklahoma along Highway 56 when she saw the bear on the utility pole. She pulled over. The animal was alive, balanced on the metal crossarm roughly 30 feet up, panting in the summer heat. She started filming.
The footage, recorded July 20 and authenticated by Storyful, shows a black bear perched on the crossarm of a utility pole near Gladstone, New Mexico, a small agricultural community in the northeastern corner of the state roughly 170 miles east of Santa Fe. The New Mexico Department of Wildlife confirmed what the video could not show: the bear did not come down alive. It was electrocuted before rescuers could reach it safely.
The response had already begun when Mullens stopped. She could hear 911 dispatch audio in the background as she filmed. Dispatchers noted that state wildlife officials had been alerted but had reached a difficult conclusion: tranquilizing the bear while it remained on the pole was too dangerous. “State officials had already been notified but said tranquilizing the animal while it remained atop the pole could have caused it to fall,” the dispatch recording indicates. A sedated bear falling from that height would likely not have survived the impact.
Mullens described the moment she understood the bear was alive. “At first, we thought that the bear was dead, until we got closer to it, and then we realized that he was still alive,” she told Fox News. The bear was panting and visibly working to maintain its position on the metal crossarm, its weight shifting as it balanced against the pole.
The electrocution happened before wildlife officials were able to find a safe approach. Whether the bear made contact with a live wire directly or was killed by current conducted through the metal pole and crossarm was not specified by the Department of Wildlife. The agency confirmed the death without providing additional detail to Fox News at the time of publication.
Wildlife biologists note that bears treat utility poles as they would trees when startled. The climbing instinct is immediate and strong; a dog, a passing vehicle, or a person moving through the animal’s territory can trigger the response, and a bear does not distinguish between a pine and a wooden pole strung with transmission lines. The difference is that trees do not carry voltage. A bear high enough on a utility pole can make contact with energized components while still bracing its lower body against the wood below, completing a circuit through the animal.
The area around Gladstone is lightly populated ranch country in Union County, near the Oklahoma and Colorado borders. Highway 56 runs northeast through the region toward the Texas panhandle. The 911 system had already been contacted before Mullens arrived at the scene. The video she captured shows the animal in the last minutes before its death.
A similar incident in Arizona in 2021 ended differently. Wildlife officers there were able to tranquilize the bear safely and recover it from the pole before it suffered harm. The New Mexico case did not allow for that outcome. The geography of the scene and the specific configuration of the wires at the Gladstone location did not give officials a safe angle of approach, and the bear died while rescuers were still attempting to reach it.
Fox News first published the authenticated Storyful video of the incident on July 22, two days after the bear climbed the pole. The footage circulated widely, in part because the animal is visibly alive in the video, panting and shifting its weight, in a scene that viewers could watch in real time but could not change.
The utility company responsible for the pole had not publicly commented on the incident as of Friday. The New Mexico Department of Wildlife did not indicate whether it would seek modifications to utility infrastructure along wildlife corridors in the northeastern corner of the state. Black bears are present across much of New Mexico, particularly at higher elevations, though they are less common in the lower ranchland around Gladstone. Whether this particular animal had been previously documented in the area was not established in the official record.
What the footage preserved is a few minutes of a situation that officials could not have resolved quickly enough even had they arrived sooner. The bear climbed the pole because something in its environment pushed it there. It died because the pole was not a tree. The Department of Wildlife confirmed those two facts without filling in the space between them, leaving the question of what startled the animal onto the crossarm of a highway utility pole in northeastern New Mexico an open one.
