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EAGLES NEST TOWNSHIP (12 MILES WEST OF ELY) — Sue Mansfield started crying as soon as she saw the cub’s face.
Even with the cub 30 feet up a cedar tree, Ely bear researcher Mansfield knew it was Hope because of its light face.
After being missing since Friday evening, with researchers holding out little hope the cub was still alive, friends of Ely bear researcher Lynn Rogers called about 6 p.m. today to say they had a lone bear cub treed. The cub came down and was captured less than two hours later.
Mansfield and Rogers had rushed to the site, which was nearly two miles from where the cub was last seen but was in an area that the cub and its mother Lily had frequented.
“This is where it spent much of its time, but it’s amazing it made it this far away in less than a day,” Rogers said.
Mansfield said the cub covered the two miles around the lake and likely had to swim a stream on its own to find the area where it had spent time with its mother.
Now that the cub is back in safe hands, Rogers said a major question remains on whether Lily will accept it back. Because they’ve been apart for five days, Lily’s hormones may have turned to the new mating season and away from taking care of her cub.
Because Lily is fitted with a GPS collar that gives her location every 10 minutes, Rogers and Mansfield hope to find her yet tonight and reintroduce Hope to Lily to see the sow's reaction. They halted an initial attempt to reintroduce them tonight when Lily ran away from the approaching vehicles.
If Lily eventually accepts Hope, the story will end with their reunion. If not, Rogers will have to decide what to do with the cub with input from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The cub could be raised by a wildlife rehabilitator and returned to the wild or could wind up as a captive bear at the North American Bear Center in Ely.
Hope hadn’t been seen since Friday, when she and Lily climbed a red pine to rest after a two-mile walk, Rogers said. Later Friday evening, Lily wandered more than two miles away, possibly chasing or being chased by a rival adult bear. By the time she returned Sunday, 50 hours later, Hope was gone from the tree and rain had erased any scent.
“We don’t know what happened — Lily spent the spring in very small areas, maybe 50 to 100 yards in diameter. It was hard to believe she was getting enough food — she finally left, we think to find better food, and took Hope two miles away,” Rogers said. “The last time Sue saw Lily and Hope together, about 6 p.m. Friday, they were both up a tree sleeping after the long walk.”
It took Lily until Sunday to get back to the red pine where she left Hope. But Hope was not in the area.
At nearly 4 months old, Hope is just beginning to eat food from the field and would not have been expected to survive for long on its own, Rogers said.
At this time of year, the cub’s best bet of nutrition in the wild probably would be ant pupae, Rogers said. But he noted that a young cub could not be expected to roll over logs or expose sheltered ant nests.
Lily is fitted with a collar that holds a GPS tracking unit so researchers can track and find her at any time. The cub, however, is too small to carry a collar.
Rogers, staff from the North American Bear Center and volunteers searched, as did Lily. But there had been no sign of Hope in the area. Rogers had all but resigned himself that the cub had perished.
That was until Tuesday afternoon.
Rogers said he left a pan of food in the area where the lone cub was sighted Tuesday and trained a trailcam on the meal-in-the-waiting.
As of 9 p.m. Tuesday, Rogers had not had any luck catching up to the missing cub, but he was expecting reinforcements. He said the St. Louis County Rescue Squad was on the way with a heat-sensing device that he hoped might reveal the young bear’s likely sleeping place in the tree canopy of the area.
Hope was born on Jan. 22 and left the den with Lily in late March after being watched for weeks by millions of people on the live Webcam placed in their meager den. It’s believed to be a first for a wild black bear birth in a den. Mansfield has continued to video the sow and cub since then, and she and Rogers often meet up with and spend time with the bears in the woods.
The videos and reports can be seen at
www.bear.org.
Cathy Williamson of Brook, Ind., who last winter won a contest sponsored by Cub Foods to name Lily’s bear cub, echoed hundreds of messages left on Lily’s Facebook page this week.
“No matter what the outcome, little Hope will always be my shining star as well as many others’ shining star,” Williamson told the News Tribune. “She has done things for people better than any doctor could ever have done.”
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