An orphaned bear cub now has a feisty and loving foster mother.
The head of Louisiana's large carnivore program said Sunday that she was able to leave the cub with a new family in the
Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge.
"I was happy to get the cub back out in a wild nest where he belongs," Maria Davidson said in an email Sunday.
This is the time of year when Davidson checks on all female Louisiana black bears that have been fitted with radio collars.
The orphaned cub's mother was ailing when Davidson checked her May 8, and died May 9 -- the day before Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced that its subspecies had recovered enough to no longer need federal protection.
Mother bears with small cubs will readily adopt another, Davidson said. This cub, small for his age, needed a foster family with cubs about his own size.
The family Davidson found happened to have an unusually protective mama.
Though Davidson often sedates the mother bears to give them a checkup and microchip the cubs, recent heavy rains left too many big puddles to make that feasible.
"She could drown in just a small puddle. (And, there were LOTS of puddles around)," Davidson wrote.
So she and another biologist were just micro-chipping the cubs and cutting a tuft of hair for DNA analysis. Except for this bear's babies.
Most of Louisiana black bear females will move off when people approach. But when the biologist tried to microchip this female's cubs, the bear made several "bluff charges" to run them off.
"This female bear was in no mood to allow us to handle her babies or hang around! So, we wisely gave her the space she needed," Davidson wrote.
They left the orphaned cub in the den, then watched from a safe distance.
Davidson says that within 30 minutes, the female had moved all three cubs to a new den.
"She's a good Mama," Davidson wrote.
