A black bear is riding a rented e-scooter around the Lower East Side, and nobody can explain it

The first photograph arrived at 7:04 on a Tuesday morning, and the newsroom assumed it was fake. It showed a full-grown American black bear standing upright on a rented electric scooter in the Delancey Street bike lane, one paw resting on the handlebar, moving at what the photographer described as “a very reasonable speed.”

By Thursday there were nine more photographs, taken by nine unrelated people, at five separate intersections. By the weekend the bear had a name. Someone at a coffee counter on Orchard Street called him Poncho — for the loose blue tarp he was seen dragging on the second day — and the name held.

“I have worked this corner for nineteen years,” said Elena Duarte, who owns a bodega on Rivington Street where Poncho has now been sighted three times. “He does not come inside. He does not bother anybody. He goes past, he looks at you, and he keeps going. Honestly? He signals before he turns.”

What the city says

The Department of Parks and Recreation confirmed that it is monitoring what it described in a written statement as “an urban black bear presence in Lower Manhattan.” The statement did not address the scooter.

Reached by phone, Sgt. Danielle Whitcomb said officers have responded to eleven calls related to the animal and have made no attempt to detain it. “Our guidance to the public is unchanged,” she said. “Do not approach, do not feed, do not attempt to ride alongside. We have had to say that last one more than once.”

He is not aggressive. He is not lost. He appears, as far as we can determine, to be commuting. — Dr. Alan Vega, wildlife biologist, Hudson Valley Field Institute

Dr. Vega, who has studied black bear behavior for two decades, cautioned against reading too much into the animal's apparent competence. Bears are strong, curious and highly imitative, he said, and a scooter left flat on a sidewalk is a stable platform that rolls when leaned on. “What we are seeing is probably an accident that worked,” he said. “The bear discovered that standing on this object makes the world move. That is a very rewarding discovery for any mammal.”

The scooter company weighs in

Volta Mobility, which operates roughly 4,000 shared scooters across three boroughs, said it had identified the vehicle in question through its GPS logs. A spokesperson, Priya Raghunathan, said the scooter had recorded twenty-two unpaid trips in eleven days, totaling just under thirty-one miles.

Asked whether the company intended to pursue the charges, Ms. Raghunathan paused for several seconds. “We are not going to bill a bear,” she said. “I want to be extremely clear about that, because I have now been asked four times.”

She added that the company had disabled the unit remotely on Wednesday night, and that it was reactivated eleven minutes later by an unknown party. Volta declined to speculate on who that party might have been.

A city that adopted him in eleven days

There is now a mural of Poncho on a roll-down security gate on Ludlow Street. There are at least six T-shirt designs, none of them licensed by anyone. A hardware store on Grand Street has a hand-lettered sign in the window reading WE DO NOT SELL SCOOTERS TO BEARS, and the owner says people come in specifically to photograph it and leave.

What happens next is unclear. Dr. Vega expects the bear to move north on his own within weeks, following food and quiet, and says intervention should be a last resort. Parks officials say a relocation team is on standby but has not been deployed.

In the meantime, Ms. Duarte keeps the bodega door propped open in the mornings, which she admits is not strictly advisable. “I want to see him one more time,” she said. “That's all. One more time and then he can go be a bear somewhere else.”

Poncho was last reported Friday at 6:40 a.m., heading east on Broome Street. He was, by all accounts, in the bike lane.