ecomium

written + photos by Hardy Friedrich
from Alaska Highway Daily News - 31 May 07

For the first time in 30 years, wildlife rehabilitator Leona Green crossed the yard to feed her bear cubs to find one dead.

“This is grim,” she said, as she took the cub in her tough, wrinkled hands and placed its body on the wooden roof of the pen.

In a dark corner inside the pen, the female cub’s brother huddled in a corner. The two orphaned bears, found in Montney and brought to her over the weekend by a conservation officer, were her first two cubs of the summer.

Green said she knows better than to get attached to the bears, but her disappointment is clear. Having rehabilitated over 100 cubs over the years, including six grizzlies, she’s never had one die.

At six that morning she brought breakfast and they both ate. They weren’t the sickliest cubs she’s ever received, but they were starved and had little energy.

“Most of them come in real thin, but I’ve never lost one,” Green said, back out in the yard of her farm near Dawson Creek as she shielded the Wednesday morning sun from her eyes.

“I’ll put the body in a bag and freeze it so (the Ministry of Environment) can determine the cause of death.”

The 70-year-old Green is one of only four people in the province qualified to rehabilitate bears. Although she has no formal training, she learned how to care for animals from her veterinarian father.

One day 30 years ago, after moving to the Peace region from Saskatchewan, a conservation officer brought her an injured owl.

“He liked the way I handled my animals so he brought me an owl and suggested I look after it. Then he brought me something else, and something else, and finally he said I’d make a good wildlife rehabilitator so he got me a permit and that was that.”

Over the years, Green has taken in deer, moose, birds, coyotes and bears. Moose are the most difficult to rehabilitate, she said, but the bears are pretty easy.

“Bears, they’ll eat anything and they are absolutely wonderful to raise,” she said, adding they get a varied diet of meat, fish, fruits, vegetables and vitamins, and often are released back into the wild at 18-months-old larger and stronger than their counterparts due to the steady diet.

But bears are also easily habituated, so she gives them space – only entering the pen to feed them and clean up. In the winter they hibernate in barrels on the edge of her yard.

“And not one of my bears has ever came back as a nuisance bear after its release,” Green said proudly.

The cause of the cub’s death remains a mystery for the moment. But Green speculated that the cubs could have gotten into something toxic before they were found.

“With all the resource extraction that’s going on out there you never know what they could get into – they will drink anything, like antifreeze or even out of sumps.”

The volunteer rehabilitator will likely see more bears this summer. The most she’s ever had at once was seven, and there was only one year she didn’t receive any.

Much of the food Green uses is donated, and she is always accepting alfalfa hay and meat (wild or beef).