DEL NORTE, Colo. (KOAA) — Five bear cubs that were orphaned over the summer have been released back into the wild as of Thursday, December 4; their first course of action (almost across the board) was to climb some trees.
CPW says three of the orphaned bears were recovered in The Broadmoor neighborhood in July. The other two were recovered from a neighborhood north of Woodland Park in August.
The cubs have spent the intervening months at CPW's Frisco Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation Facility, which is located near Del Norte.
So they're making sure that they're eating natural foods, things that they're going to be able to find on the landscape, but then also making sure that they're not becoming human conditioned, that they're not going to be comfortable around people, that they're not going to look right back to those places they got in trouble in the very first place.
On December 4, CPW officers retrieved the cubs from the rehabilitation facility and transported them to two separate locations within Teller County.
"And so what's going to happen," stated Sauder, "is they're going to go out on that natural landscape and they're going to realize that there's no food. And what that does is that naturally starts that process for them to den up and go into that hibernation or that torpor just naturally."
CPW says they have fitted two of the cubs with GPS ear tag transmitters supplied through a data gathering partnership with the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. They say the transmitters allow officers to track movements following the bear's release.
“We are grateful for our partnership with the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, whose members help fund conservation efforts, including these GPS devices, to help Colorado Parks and Wildlife study pressing issues,” said Deme Wright, CPW District Wildlife Manager.
The research partnership was launched in 2022.
And what that'll allow us to do is to monitor these bears into the future, and it's going to give us a lot of really great information. When do they go into their den? When do they come out in the spring? Where do they go? How do they move about the landscape? And really, at the end of the day, what's the overall success of this program.
According to CPW, urban bear conflict is a recurring issue in our region, especially for bears attracted to food or trash near homes. They also say the ongoing study of rehabilitation of orphaned bear cubs is crucial to future mitigation efforts.
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