A pair of Haileybury orphaned bear cubs, rescued from a utility pole, are safe at Bear With Us Centre for Bears Rehabilitation, Education, Sanctuary and have been named AC / DC after the predicament they found themselves in.
On May 1, the pair, approximately 2.5kgs each, were seen high on a town's electrical pole
According to Bear With Us. retired Conservation Officer Pete Gilboe, OPP officers including A.J. Parcher, as well as a bucket truck crew from Hydro One, worked together to help the 3 to 4-month-old cubs get safely down from their perch.
Officer A.J. Parcher then carefully arrested one cub and put the tiny, scared bear into the back of a police cruiser. The second cub soon joined his brother.
Gilboe took the cubs to his home and cared for them for a day with the hope that a mother bear may still be alive and be seen searching the area for her cubs. Sadly, no mother bear appeared.
An employee from Bear With Us, Mike McIntosh, drove to get the cubs.
Both cubs are males and have been named Alex cub and Danny cub, cleverly nicknamed AC/DC.
"A wonderful story of dedication and cooperation resulted in help for the two orphans," noted the Bear With Us Facebook page.
McIntosh is the president and founder of Bear With Us.
He tells BayToday that rescuers didn't consider the cubs dangerous.
"There really is no danger in any bear, but those cubs are so small they are barely old enough to be afraid, but they definitely were terrified when they were captured. They hardly have any teeth. If they did bite us they're not going to hurt us."
McIntosh says the cubs are being cared for in his house so they can be monitored.
"They are drinking formula out of a bowl and we are watching and cleaning them."
The cubs will stay on the formula until the end of July.
"When they change diets...they are used to mother's milk, but now we have switched them to formula, which gives them the same nutrition but we expect diarrhea to happen, and that's what's happened. We have to make sure they don't get dehydrated and their health isn't affected by that, so we're watching them very closely."
McIntosh says once the cub's health has stabilized they'll be moved to a larger area.
Come the summer of 2023, the cubs will be returned to the wild somewhere in the District of North Bay, which is their area of origin.
Staff from Natural Resources will help in finding an ideal location for the young bears to go free.
Interestingly, McIntosh says this kind of thing isn't at all rare for the Centre.
"Every spring we usually end up with cubs because their mother has been shot, or a situation like this where we don't know what happened, but it was probably caused by people...either shot or roadkill. The cubs aren't very mobile so whatever happened probably wasn't far from where they were found."
McIntosh says he's been doing this sort of thing for 30 years, and in that time, over 700 orphaned rescued bears have been returned to the wild.
He gives a lot of credit to MNR staff because a lot of the cubs are rescued by them, and they ensure the animals get the help they need.
Just last year alone, McIntosh says the Centre returned 85 bears to the wild. That's a big number he admits, and he says there's a reason for that.
"It involves the lack of natural food and bear habitat such as berries. That means they go to human establishments looking for alternate supplies of food or to hunter's bait sites. Either way, the mortality rate is high, which leaves the cubs as orphans."
