The three little bears: An Alaska fairy tale

CINTHIA RITCHIE

June 12, 2008 at 10:48AM AKST

This is an Alaska fairy tale about three little orphaned bear cubs. It is a story filled with happiness, inevitable partings and lots of smelly salmon treats.

It begins two years ago in the town of Kotzebue, when a small and fluffy bear cub was spotted rummaging around at the town landfill. Its mother was never found, so the little cub, named after Sadie Creek, was taken to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center outside of Portage.

Another motherless cub was soon found roaming through Haines and was also brought to the center. The two frolicked together in the mud and glory of an Alaska summer and were later joined by a third cub, Kenai, found by wildlife biologists on the outskirts of Seward.

The three little bears, Sadie, Haines and Kenai, lived together at the center for almost two years. They learned life lessons, played with Halloween pumpkins and grew to be 300 pounds.

On April 18, they left for the Minnesota Zoo, where they were given a new home with a pond and trees and promises that they would be together forever.

According to Diana Weinhardt, Russia Grizzly Coast curator at the Minnesota Zoo who formerly worked with the bears at AWCC, the bears will be part of the zoo’s new Russia Grizzly Coast exhibit, which opened June 7. It’s the first time the zoo has had brown bears, and keeping them together was important.

“They’ll stay together,” she said. “They will be here until death do us apart.”

In the beginning
Backtrack a couple of years to 2006. It’s late summer, and three cuddly bears are being housed at the AWCC in a penned area right outside Kelly and Mike Miller’s house.

They both work at the center, and it doesn’t take long for them to become attached.

“They were just these little fur balls,” Kelly Miller said.

Sadie, the outgoing one, arrived first. When Haines showed up a few weeks later, she immediately chased him up a tree.

“By the time he came down, they were best friends,” she said.

Kenai came right before the end of summer. All three cubs ate puppy chow soaked in milk, and applesauce as a treat. Before long they had become part of the family.

“Their enclosure is right next to us, and every time we walked out we’d see them and they would be doing something cute, playing with their toes or in the water.”

The bears were slated to go to the Minnesota Zoo and were housed at the center while the new exhibit was being built. The Millers worked to get the bears used to the crates that would ship them to the zoo.

“We knew from the beginning that they couldn’t stay,” Miller said. “We were pretty much foster parents. When the crates arrived and we saw them it was like, ‘Oh, they’re going to Minnesota.’”

Miller thinks the bears knew it was time to leave.

“When we transported them to the airport, it was almost like they wanted to go,” she said. “When they woke up, they never panicked or hit the sides. It was like, ‘Oh, where are we going now?’”

Hanging out at the zoo
Weinhardt, the Minnesota Zoo’s grizzly curator, has been working with Sadie, Haines and Kenai since their arrival. The bears are in a joint exhibit area with ready access to each others’ dens.

She’s training them for blood draws. They already know how to sit, come here and target with their noses. All training and contact is done through meshing.  

“We have a cabinet full of bear treats,” she said. “Oreo cookies are good. They’ll do anything for an Oreo.”

When the training gets stressful, she makes them special treats. Last week she fixed them salmon sandwiches. It was a big hit.

“They perk up their ears,” she said. “They know, ‘I gotta listen now.’”

Weinhardt plans on teaching them to stand on the scale and to present their paws for claw inspection.

The bears all have distinctive personalities. Sadie is the boss and always has to go first.

“She’s very quick,” Weinhardt said. “She sees the treats and she’s like, ‘Alright, what do you want me to do?’”

Haines is the big guy of the bunch, and very, very stubborn.

“He’s like, ‘Maybe I feel like doing it and maybe I don’t,’” she said.

Kenai was the runt of his litter (he was part of triplets; the other cubs had to be put down by Fish and Game officials, according to Weinhardt) and has a very runt-like personality.

“He won’t go first,” she said. “He hangs back. But I think he’s the smartest. He assesses each situation.”

Thousands of miles away, Kelly Miller still worries about the three bears. Watching them leave, she said, was a sad day. It was like a funeral.  “They were good bears,” she said. “They were my friends.”

She knows they’ve gone to a good home and is happy about that. Still, she misses them.

“I’d like to go visit them someday,” she said. “ I wonder if they’d remember me.”

Cinthia Ritchie can be reached at (907) 342-2428 or toll free at (800) 770-9830, ext. 428.