Pagosa Springs
Kate Larsen hasn’t seen her babies in three weeks. Not since the day she left them alone for a few hours and the man in the big truck came and took them away.
The man called her later. Said he’d left them deep in the San Juan National Forest. Larsen thinks they’ll be OK because both of them are fat. They’re also covered with fur and can smell food two miles away.
Larsen’s babies are bear cubs, of course, now nearly a year old. She adopted them in July when they weighed 10 pounds each. She helped them put on 100 pounds of fat and muscle and taught them eating and foraging skills at the Frisco Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation Center near Del Norte.
On Nov. 30 the man in the truck – Division of Wildlife officer Mike Reid – took the cubs that he’d captured four months earlier and released them into the wild.
“They were just tiny furballs,” said Larsen, the new manager of the DOW’s rehab center. “They were my first babies. I bet they found a nice den and are sleeping off that fat.”
The cubs were the offspring of a black bear killed by a campground owner near this southwestern Colorado town. The sow wandered north from New Mexico during the summer, a pair of New Mexico Department of Game and Fish ear tags telling of run-ins with people. In Colorado she was teaching her cubs to find food in garbage cans. The camp owner shot her. He was not charged.
“She had become too accustomed to human food,” Reid said.
The cubs, about 5 months old, were alone with little chance of surviving until Reid rescued them, using their mother’s body to lure them into a container trap.
“They were still hanging around the body,” Reid said. “I put the sow in the trap and waited for them to go in. I trapped the first one, but it was bawling so loud the other cub ran up a tree.”
He eventually got both cubs and trucked them to Larsen’s rehab facility. Instead of starving to death, the cubs now had a chance to become wild, adult bears.
If only they weren’t frightened by small dead animals.
“We gave them logs stuffed with chokecherries to make them work for their food,” said Larsen. “And we introduced them to more of their natural food.”
Larsen tossed the cubs a dead rabbit. The bears ran away.
“They went to the end of the enclosure and stood on their hind legs and sniffed the air,” she said. “It took hours, but eventually they inched closer. One of them batted the dead rabbit around and then they tasted it.”
They liked it. Larsen added dead birds and parts of deer carcasses to the cubs’ diet.
Reid said that five years ago, amid one of the worst droughts in Western U.S. history, more than 30 cubs were brought to the Frisco Creek center.
“During those hard years they have to travel to find food and that brings them into conflict with humans,” he said.
Many of the cubs Reid has handled have grown into adulthood in the wild, recognizable by white tags in their ears. Which, he said, leaves him in an uncomfortable spot. Because in the fall, Reid also goes bear hunting.
“There’s a reason young animals are popular with people,” he said, taking great care to avoid the word cute. “The shape of their face and all that. You just can’t help look at young bears and feel something toward them. But I’m also a hunter and hunting is what pays for wildlife management and we do hunt bears. We’ve had several of our orphaned cubs taken by hunters when the cubs became adults.”
Then he paused.
“Let’s just say if I was hunting and saw one of those white ear tags that I put on them when they were cubs,” Reid said, “well, that bear wouldn’t have anything to fear from me.”
Which is good news for Larsen, who was away from the rehab center when Reid took the cubs Nov. 30 and released them.
“I was a little sad that I didn’t get to say goodbye,” she said.
And then it was time for her to get back to work. Another sow was killed a few months ago. Larsen has two more babies to raise.
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
