On a week when heavy smoke from Canadian wildfires forced many people to take precautions they’re not used to, an animal so associated with wildfire prevention they’re known as Smokey made a visit of its own — forcing people to take precautions they’re not really used to.

Talk about a metaphor, huh?

Residents in Brookland were awakened Friday morning with news of a black bear wandering around the neighborhood, only a day after a similar bear was spotted just across the Maryland border in Hyattsville. A video posted on a Brookland neighborhood Facebook group showed the bear sauntering across a street in the leafy and residential area, only to be found an hour later some 40 feet up in a tree just off of Rhode Island Avenue NE.

Neighbors and police officers alike gathered at a distance to gawk at the bear, dubbed Smokey by some, Franklin by others after the street many of the closest residents lived on, or, more simply, the Brookland Bear.

“Did you see the movie ‘Cocaine Bear’?” one police officer asked another. “Funniest movie ever.” (Cocaine makes people energetic and euphoric; the Brookland Bear was merely napping.)

“He’s just trying to get to Uproar for Pride. Leave him alone,” noted one person on Twitter. (The city’s annual pride celebrations are this weekend.)

“My friends will no longer step foot in my neighborhood if they ran into Boo Boo while visiting me,” offered another.

My wife, all too willing to get in on the bear puns, said what we’ve all been thinking: this week has been a bit… unbearable. And yes, there were of course references to the bear patrols from “The Simpsons.”

“We come from bear country and this is just a yearling. He’s scrounging for garbage and will make a habit of coming back to anyplace he finds food. Black bears are pretty dang harmless at this stage in life and are way more scared of you than you are of him. If you come across a momma with cubs, definitely steer clear, but he/she is more like a raccoon than anything tearing through garbage!” posted one Brookland neighbor, bearing more knowledge of the Ursus americanus than most D.C. residents would usually have.

An officer with the Humane Rescue Alliance told neighbors much the same, noting that the bear was young and largely wouldn’t harm anyone unless startled. “This one was in Maryland. We pretty much give them their space,” she said. “It’s a healthy animal, just minding its business.”

“If that bear does come down, we don’t want to crowd it and scare it,” said a police official as he asked neighbors — many of whom were walking their dogs, which can threaten bears — to clear the street around 8 a.m.

“We all taste like chicken, right?” joked one neighbor.

Smoky chicken, maybe.

By 10 a.m. the bear suddenly made its way down the tree, and staff from the Humane Rescue Alliance, National Zoo, and Maryland Department of Natural Resources were on hand to sedate it. It didn’t happen immediately — the bear was briefly on the run, though it only made it a few yards over — but it was eventually shot with a tranquilizer dart.

“The bear has been tranquilized and is asleep by the Human Rescue Alliance in the backyard of a home in the 1300 block of Franklin Street, NE,” announced the Metropolitan Police Department.

According to Chris Schindler, the vice president of field services at the Humane Rescue Alliance, the bear was a juvenile male and weighed about 200 pounds. Schindler said Maryland officials had been tracking him through the state in recent days, and that he wandered into D.C. — rare as local bear sightings are — wasn’t wholly surprising.

“It is super common for juvenile bears to explore territory,” he said. “They don’t know the difference between the city and Maryland. It’s not abnormal even though it is unusual to have them in the city.”

The last bear that Schindler remembers crossing into D.C. was a decade ago, in upper Northwest. In that case, the same protocol was followed.

The bear — Franklin, let’s call him — has already been relocated back into Maryland.

This post has been updated with information from the Humane Rescue Alliance.