This Visitor Was a Bear of a Guest in Couple’s Pool : Nature: Family isn’t sure whether the bear fell in, took a purposeful dip or was washing up in their swimming pool.

A sloshing sound in the swimming pool awoke Gary Potter at 5 a.m. Thursday, but the 42-year-old Monrovia auto body shop owner wasn’t too alarmed by an apparent intruder.

“I thought it was a raccoon, or maybe a big dog,” said Potter, who after 10 years of living in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains has grown accustomed to all manner of wildlife visiting his residence on three acres off Norumbega Drive.

Then the sound grew louder. Potter looked into the darkness beyond the bedroom sliding door that opens to a poolside patio. “I saw something on the decking. It was soaking wet. Then it stood up.”

It was a bear.

After waking his wife, Connie (“She never would have believed me”), Gary Potter took photographs of the bear as it walked around the pool. For a few minutes, the animal stared at the Potters and then strolled down their driveway and back into the mountains, they said.

“The picture doesn’t do it justice,” said 42-year-old Connie Potter as she looked at a dim color photograph. From it, two shiny eyes glinted and the distinctive curve of a bear’s hind quarters appeared amid the shadows beside a potted palm, about 10 feet from the barbecue grill on the covered patio.

The Potters said they aren’t sure if the bear fell in, took a purposeful dip or simply was washing up in the pool.

“The pool was filthy. It looks like it has never been cleaned,” said Gary Potter, who prides himself on keeping his pool tidy. “I guess he went right down the pool steps because there was slime all over the steps.”

“Bears do like water,” said U.S. Forest Service biologist Patti Krueger. But she and other experts on the San Gabriels say this was the first time they’ve heard of a bear going into a suburban swimming pool.

Krueger theorized that the bear wound up there because it was perhaps lost, ill, young or a “garbage bear”--one that has grown addicted to eating from garbage cans.

The results of a four-year Cal Poly Pomona study on San Gabriel Mountains bears, she said, suggests that the animals have sufficient water supply in spite of the drought in recent years. So, she said, the animal would not have come to the pool in need of water to drink.

Earlier this week, just a few miles from the Potters, bear prints were spotted around Monrovia Canyon Park, Monrovia Parks Supt. George Hills said.

There have been a number of sightings in the area, he said. “We just try to educate people to live in harmony with the animals,” he said. Part of that campaign is encouraging foothill residents to keep pet food inside and to make sure household garbage isn’t readily available to wildlife.

The bear’s appearance was the Potters’ most exciting encounter with wildlife at their home since 1985, when Gary was bitten on the arm by a rattlesnake while trimming the shrubs. “That’s just one of things you trade off for living in a place with a lots of peace and quiet,” he said.