There are still a lot of questions behind the discovery and rescue last week of an undersized bear cub in Oro Valley.
The bear, estimated to be under a year old, was first spotted a mile away from where it was eventually captured. Its mother’s whereabouts remain unknown, raising questions about the circumstances leading to the little bear’s separation.
A black bear cub is removed from a tree Sunday by Field Supervisor Mark Frieberg of Arizona Game and Fish near North Oracle Road and East Catalina Shadows Boulevard.
“The bear weighs 15 pounds, a 15-pound bear should be about four or five months old. The math doesn’t work,” said Mark Hart, a spokesman for Arizona Game and Fish.
Hart explained why the bear’s age and size didn’t match up.
“Bears in Arizona are typically born in January and February,” he said. “Then this bear should be a year old or almost a year old, in which case it should weigh 70 pounds.”
While Oro Valley, where the bear was found, is known for bear and mountain lion sightings, the circumstances surrounding this cub’s presence are unusual as well.
Hart was stumped by the mystery of how the bear, seemingly abandoned or orphaned by its mother, made its way off the Catalina Mountains to a residential area.
“If it got separated from its mother, regardless of why in the back country, how did a bear that small get all the way off the mountain?,” he asked?
“We would have thought that a bear that size would have been picked off by a predator. A coyote, a mountain lion, or even another bear.”
The bear has been moved to Bearizona, a wildlife park in Williams.
Despite being small for its estimated age, the bear displayed good health and is exhibiting normal behaviors, said Dave O’Connell, Bearizona’s chief operating officer.
However, O’Connell noted the bear shows no fear of humans.
O’Connell explained that once bears equate humans with a good source of food, “they tend to know that forever.”
Bearizona expects the bear to be under professional care for the rest of its life.
The bear, yet to be named, will join other black bears at Bearizona. O’Connell estimated that, with proper care, the bear could reach a size of 450 to 500 pounds in adulthood.
“Depending on his genetics, of course, that’ll limit him. But feed won’t here at Bearizona,” he said.
The park intends to closely monitor the bear during quarantine before introducing it to public exhibits.
O’Connell says the cub has a vet appointment scheduled for next week, when some questions surrounding the mystery of the bear’s age should be cleared up.
But how the bear ended up in a tree outside of an Oro Valley sub-division remains to be seen.
“He probably had been on his own for a while,” speculated Hart, of Game and Fish. “But the piece about how he got off the mountain, we just don’t have an answer for it.”
