While it may not be Halloween yet, Stacey Richason is dressing up in a bear suit — mask and all — for an important job.
"That is bear formula — milk," she said as she scoops it into a blender to make a breakfast smoothie for a bear cub. "(If) he doesn't want something or doesn't like it one day, like most kids, we just try again."
Richason is a wildlife care specialist at the San Diego Humane Society Ramona Wildlife Center, where she and a team care for an abandoned black bear cub who was 2 months old when he was found.
"Some hikers found him in Los Padres National Forest," said Angela Hernandez-Cusick, the wildlife supervisor at the center.
The cub was underweight and weak when he was found. Rangers there tried to find the cub's mother, but when she didn't return for the cub, he was brought to the Wildlife Center.
This is only the fourth cub this young to enter rehab care in California in the past five years.
“Getting one this young in the season is rare for us," Hernandez-Cusick said. "Some of the challenges that we’ve faced is, just behaviorally, how do we want to provide for him as much as a mother bear would?”
Part of that is dressing as a bear anytime the team interacts with him and "doing our best to try to mimic some of those maternal behaviors when we’re in there with him," she said.
As odd as the bear suit and mask seem (it's actually a donated bear fur coat), it is essential that the cub doesn't get attached and imprinted on humans.
"(It's) a little silly, a little cliché, but we do our best to find some that is realistic," Hernandez-Cusick said. "But when the bear looks at us, it actually looks more like a mom instead of a humanoid figure.”
The team tries to mask human scent with bear scent from fur and hay donated by Lions, Tigers and Bears animal sanctuary in Alpine.
They are going through all this trouble because the ultimate goal is to release the cub back to the wild.
Although the costumed-care technique is relatively new and its effectiveness has not been thoroughly researched, the center has had success with it before.
"We have had a lot of success raising coyote pups that are very young by covering our faces up, trying to cover our human scent as much with coyotes as possible," Hernandez-Cusick said. "So when we received a bear cub this young, we thought, 'Why not try that as well?'”
Since then, the cub has tripled in size and reached a milestone, learning to dig through soil for worms and insects.
