Angoon cub off to Montana sanctuary

SITKA, ALASKA

Her name is Pandora, and she’s 20-pounds of furry mischief. At this moment, her face is black and gooey.

“We were just getting ready to move her over here and she found a nice warm creosote telephone pole,” said Les Kinnear, who runs Fortress of the Bear in Sitka. The ¾ acre bear habitat has been Pandora’s home since mid-May.

“And there’s nothing she likes better than exploring new scents,” Kinnear said. “And unfortunately it’s a sticky, oily, gooey mess. She got it all over her ears and her forehead and down both front legs. And it took about two seconds to do it. It’ll take about two hours to clean it up.”

We’re inside one of the two giant concrete habitats at the Fortress. Years ago, these were clarifier tanks for a pulp mill. The mill closed, and four years ago, Kinnear and his wife Evy began turning the tanks into bear habitat. There are five bears here in the long-term. Pandora is just a temporary resident.

She’s been adopted by Montana Grizzly Encounter, which sits off Interstate 90, about 14 miles east of Bozeman. Casey Anderson is one of the co-owners of the sanctuary, which until now has been home only to bears rescued from inhumane captive situations.

Anderson here to pick up the cub, but he’s also joined by a camera crew for the cable television show he hosts, called “Expedition Wild” on the Nat Geo Wild channel.

“I love wildlife,” Anderson says. “I’m a naturalist. I love all species in North America, but brown bears particularly have captivated me. I’ve watched them in the wild and have had these relationships at the sanctuary. They’re all very individual and intelligent and emotional.”

And, he hopes, educational. Anderson says most people usually only hear about bears when the bears have done something wrong – attacked a human, for example – and as a result, have a fear of the animal rather than a respect for it.

“So here’s this little bear here in Alaska, who has no other option, but in the bigger picture, she does have an option to make a difference for her wild cousins through education. Her life is going to be worth something.”

When a cub is orphaned in the wild it rarely is able to take care of itself. State wildlife managers will ordinarily kill orphaned cubs discovered in the wild, or let nature take its course. Only when a bear has a home already waiting for it will the state take custody of it.

In this case, with Pandora, there was no home, but local citizens intervened before the state, and so she was brought to Sitka while her fate was determined. The Kinnears, who had met Anderson a few years ago, called him to see if he could take Pandora.

Since its establishment in 2007, the Fortress has been a local lightning rod for debates over bear management – whether orphaned cubs should be saved and held in captivity, destroyed, or left to whatever nature has in mind. Anderson and I are standing near a room holding some of the larger bears when I ask him his thoughts on that.

“It’s two-fold,” he says. “I feel like nature should take its course sometimes. In a perfect world it could exist that way. But we as humans have stuck our paws into the wild world and have manipulated it. And often these orphaned bears are results of what we’ve done. In that, I feel we have a responsibility to clean up the mess that we’ve created.”

So this bear is off to Montana. She’ll live by herself for a while, under the care of Grizzly Encounter director Ami Testa.

“I actually live in the same building as the bears,” she said. “I have an apartment. You walk through my door right into the kitchen, then the kitchen door right into the bear den.”

Testa will interact with Pandora every day, so on this sunny and warm Wednesday afternoon, she spends some time sitting with the cub.

“After a little while she finally came over, and she did sniff me and whatnot, and was fine with it, and then of course a little bit later she did give me a little nip in the leg,” Testa said. “Mainly I think she was just trying to see what my reaction would be – if I was somebody who could be trusted or not.”

When Pandora took that nip, Testa did her best not to move, shout, or even react.

“I definitely was screaming inside,” she said. “It definitely hurt. It stung really bad, even for five minutes after. I’m pretty sure I feel something running down my leg so she probably drew a little bit of blood. But this bear could be living with me for the next 40 years, so it’s really important how we build that bond right now.”

That bond was just beginning to form between Les Kinnear and Pandora. He says seeing the cub leave Sitka is bittersweet.