Seven orphaned black bear cubs that were raised at the Wildlife Center of Virginia over the past year have now been returned to the wild. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Earlier this year, WMRA reported on the seven black bear cubs that came to live at the Wildlife Center in Waynesboro last year after their mothers, or sows, were killed or separated from them by wildfire. As of last week, all seven have been released back into the wild.
Katie Martin, a deer, bear, and turkey biologist with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, said mid-April is a natural time for adolescent bears to leave their mother and siblings.
KATIE MARTIN: They've got to find their own territory to set up.
The DWR staff choose release locations that are remote and have an abundance of natural food for the bears – like skunk cabbage and mayapple.
MARTIN: So we'll get into these remote areas with this good habitat and open the doors up on the trap for them to run out, and usually within just seconds, their head peeks out, they're looking around, they're smelling … and then they run out of that trap, and generally run off. ... A lot of them, the first thing they'll do is try to climb a tree, or sometimes they'll find something edible, a mushroom or something close by and try to take a bite of it. But generally their first thought is to get far away from people, which is great. That tells us they're a true wild bear.
Typically, no news is good news when it comes to the released bears – that means they aren't having run-ins with humans. But there are exceptions, like an encounter that happened two or three years ago.
MARTIN: We captured a female bear who had been an orphan cub. … She was raised up at the center, she was released back into the wild. We then caught her as a female and put a GPS collar on her, and then she got to serve as a foster mom for future cubs.
That bear got to pay it forward to other cubs, orphaned like she once was.
