Center saves orphaned black bears

ATLANTA, Idaho — Jabbed with tranquilizers, her ear pierced with a green ID tag, Twister finally traded her steel transport box for freedom after a bumpy 90-mile ride into central Idaho's mountains.

The yearling black bear orphan stepped from an open cage onto a dusty truck bed, dropped softly to the earth and disappeared into the timber.

Twister was separated from her mother by a freak mountain tornado last June. Raised at the Idaho Black Bear Rehabilitation Center in Boise, the 7-pound weakling grew big on formula, apples and dog food. Twelve months later, she's a 100-pounder ready for the wild.

"I didn't think she was going to survive," confesses Sally Maughan, the bear rescue operation founder. "She couldn't stand on her own two legs."

Maughan and John Beecham, a retired Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologist she works with, have saved hundreds of orphaned black bears from Idaho, Utah, Washington and Oregon since the center opened in 1989.

Today, they field phone calls from bear rehabilitators in Turkey, South Korea and Pakistan seeking advice on how to help their own orphan and often endangered bears. China, just beginning to return its giant pandas to the wild, is also interested in their work.

The London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals, which helps pay Maughan's $35,000 annual budget, also hopes her work convinces people around the globe that rehabilitating orphan bears like Twister, then releasing them deep in the forest, is better than jailing them in concrete cells or turning them into a gypsy's dancing clown.

"The general perception is cubs need to learn from their mothers and orphaned cubs will never survive," Victor Watkins, WSPA's wildlife director, told The Associated Press. "We can prove that bear rehab and release can work and can be successful."

It's a task made no easier by incidents like the rare black bear attack June 17 at a Utah campsite that killed an 11-year-old boy — and reinforced the image of the dangerous bear.

Of the nearly 150 bears rescued by Maughan's center since 1989, just two are known to have become "nuisance bears" and had to be destroyed, she said. For the last three years, Beecham has documented the success of 19 orphaned cubs outfitted with radio collars. Even bears like Twister that must be bottle fed every two hours have thrived in the wild, he said.

"Bears are solitary creatures. It's a natural process to break away from their caretaker," Beecham said. "We just have to make sure they don't think any person they come across is going to be a source of food."