Appalachian Bear Rescue helps displaced cubs return to their native habitat.
Photo Above: Bear rescues occur most often after young bears are orphaned when their mothers are struck by cars, shot by landowners or euthanized for feeding on garbage and showing no signs of fear.
Photos Courtesy of Appalachian Bear Rescue.
In June of 2022, Appalachian Bear Rescue and Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency began getting calls about a black bear cub in the woods with a strange piece of plastic on its head. By the time the wildlife professionals finally caught up with Little Trouble, as she would come to be called, the foreign object—an empty plastic snack jug—was causing extreme overheating and exhaustion. The mother and siblings, who’d previously been spotted too, were gone; when the baby couldn’t keep up, they had moved on without her.
“She turned into this beautiful large black bear, but it’s a good example of how trash can harm bears, not only by coming in contact with humans, but also physically in the way that trash can get stuck on them, in their throat, in their stomach and, in her case, her head,” says Tori Reibel, ABR education and communications coordinator. “It’s just amazing that she was able to survive.”
One of the 380 cubs and yearlings rehabilitated by the nonprofit organization since 1996, Little Trouble recovered and was released into the wild early this year.
The seed for ABR (originally called Appalachian Black Bear Rehabilitation and Release Center) was planted in the fall of 1989, when a shortage of acorns, nuts and seeds—a primary source of calories for black bears—led to starvation for some of the animals and propelled others into lower elevations to find food. The subsequent contact with humans left many cubs orphaned or abandoned.
In partnership with the TWRA and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, ABR started building a facility just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Townsend, Tennessee, with the ultimate goal of caring for displaced cubs until they could be released. The first one arrived in July 1996. About six months old and underweight, Zero stayed for a couple of months, just long enough to “get a little bit more meat on his bones” before his release, Reibel says.
Since then, wildlife experts from nine Southern states have sent cubs to ABR. At the nursery, round-the-clock care is provided for small neonate cubs as young as three weeks. The Cub House helps the bears transition to the outdoors, where half-acre “wild enclosures” house them when they’re almost ready to return to their natural habitats.
“Our main mission is to minimize human contact so that they’re able to be released back into the wild,” Reibel says. “We’ve got to draw that line and treat them like wild animals even though they are really cute when they’re young.” Finding foster moms for the cubs is ideal—black bear sows will adopt babies that aren’t theirs—but not always feasible. In the nursery, ABR staff members stay as hands-off as possible, darkening windows with blackout shades to mimic a bear den, facing away from the babies while bottle-feeding, and wearing the same unwashed, black, fluffy shirts every day so as not to introduce new scents or encourage a connection between humans and food. Blog posts and videos help curious bear lovers and ABR supporters keep up with the bears’ progress.
Increasingly, Reibel says, young bears are orphaned when their mothers are struck by cars, shot by landowners or euthanized for feeding on garbage and showing no signs of fear.
“The most detrimental time in a wild black bear’s life is that first early beginning, the first year or two,” says Reibel. “We’re able to step in and foster a safe environment, but in a hands-off way where they can learn and practice all of those instinctual skills, so that when they’re released, they are on par with their wild counterparts and can go be a part of the wild population where otherwise they probably would not have made it.”
For more info, see appalachianbearrescue.org.
What to Do if You Find a Bear Cub
- If it’s obviously injured, immediately call your state’s wildlife agency.
- If it’s merely alone, don’t make assumptions, don’t interfere and don’t try to feed it. “Mama bears will oftentimes leave their cubs to forage, or they’ll send them up a tree and kind of have the tree act as a babysitter,” says Tori Reibel, education and communications coordinator at Appalachian Bear Rescue in Townsend, Tennessee. “We often get calls from people about cubs crying up in a tree, but the mama bear comes back.”
- For emergencies only, contact Appalachian Bear Rescue at 865-448-0143.
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2023 issue.
