On January 2, a crew of Fish and Game staff moved an 80-pound bear cub into her new home in the Sagehen Valley north of Truckee. Moonshine photographer, Court Leve, was on hand to document the release. His eyewitness description appears in italics.
Though not yet a year old, the cub had already been through a lot. On September 10, her mother was hit by a car and killed on Highway 89. County staff captured the cub that day, and took her to an animal shelter in Auburn for a brief stay before transporting her the rest of the way to a Fish and Game facility in Rancho Cordova.
But the cub had other ideas. During the night she wriggled from her cage and staged a temporary escape via a redwood tree. Fish and Game staff retrieved her in the morning. At the time she weighed 40 pounds.
I was given the assignment to cover a bear cub release. I wasn’t sure what to expect. As I approached the staging area it became apparent that a bear release is serious business.
Of the some 15 people on hand there was a mix of animal doctors, a number of folks from the Fish and Game Department, and a slew of news crews from Reno and Sacramento getting the scoop.
Faerthen Felix, Assistant Manager of the U.C. Berkeley Field Station at Sagehen, explained that news crews were glad to find a happy bear event after a summer that saw 70 bears killed by cars.
‘People are just looking for a good story,’ Felix said. ‘It’s been such a brutal year for bears. So it’s nice to see a little hope.’
The story was picked up by the AP wire, and ran on CNN as well.
Last to arrive on-scene was the bear, kept in an aluminum cage with very few openings. The handlers try to limit what the bear sees and hears while in captivity so as to not let the bear associate with human activity. Just prior to the bear’s arrival we were all told to keep our voices low and that the bear had yet to be sedated.
According to Felix, it’s a lucky thing when a cub is wild enough to be released.
‘If a bear’s been anywhere near a dumpster it’s not a candidate,’ Felix said, ‘(Fish and Game) just won’t even bother because the bear’s going to be a problem and they’ll just end up shooting it anyway.’
I was under the impression that the bear would receive a simple injection and be sedated. Well that’s not so, due to a few contributing factors. First, there are only a few small peepholes in the metal cage, mainly for ventilation. This means the doctor wielding a high-tech needle on a stick must blindly inject the bear through a small opening of the cage.
A spoonful of jelly is placed near a hole, through which a pink bear’s tongue pokes out – meaning that then the doctor has a pretty good guess as to where the rear of the bear would be.
For rear in question, see photo.
The first injection is given and you can see the cage shake and hear the bear jump from the pinch and shock of the three-inch needle.
Feeling good about the injection, the doctor and staff wait for the sedative to take effect. The gauge? The jelly on the spoon. When the bear is unable to continue eating, the staff knows it’s safe to open the cage.
Eventually, after another injection, the jelly test came back positive. Workers slowly opened the cage door, attached a radio transmitter tag to the cub’s right ear and took her to the plastic dog igloo that would be her new den. The doghouse was lined with straw from the bear’s previous cage to give it the scent of home, and outfitted with a long, upright snorkel pipe to keep the air flowing through the winter snows.
After placing the cub inside the den, Fish and Game staff covered the entrance with pine boughs.
If all goes well, the cub will remain in the dogloo for the winter, and in the spring Sagehen staff will carry the makeshift den back to the field station in preparation for the next cub who needs a home.
