Animals of the Alaska Zoo: Jake & Oreo

As you found out in my first installment of “Animals of The Alaska Zoo”, eleven years ago we had a brown bear cub living together with a polar bear cub. This posting is to tell you about her.

She had only been with us only a few days when a troupe of girl scouts came to visit. As you may know, a baby brown bear typically has a “ring” of white fur around their necks which they eventually grow out of as adults. Well, one of the scouts pointed out that she looked like an Oreo cookie because of the ring – so we named her Oreo.

Oreo and Ahpun got along together quite well for a good five years before puberty hit. Those of you who have teenagers know that it’s usually not a good idea to have two teenage girls living together in the same room – invariably the arguments break out and peace & quiet are a thing of the past.

It was rather unexpected – to me, at least – that Oreo was the more dominate one. I always assumed a polar bear would be more aggressive than a brown bear. But when you take in to account their hunting methods, it makes more sense. A polar bear is more of a “hide and seek” type of hunter whereas the brown bear is more of a “chase and attack” type of hunter.

What was happening between our girls was that Oreo started bossing Ahpun around, not letting her eat or go in the pool. Our vet had a few too many house calls to patch up scratches and bites, so we started working on getting the two of them separated.

Jake is our huge Kodiak bear, weighing in at well over 1,000 pounds. We don’t actually know for sure, because it’s been quite some time since we were able to weigh him accurately. We know that the Kodiak bear could weigh as much as 1,500 pounds: he’s big but not quite that big.

He came to us back in 1982 along with his sister, Jackie. They were both orphaned, so needed a home. Unfortunately, Jackie died about 10 years later leaving Jake all by himself, so we thought he might enjoy some company. We built an addition to his enclosure to house Oreo while the two of them got acquainted with each other, thru the bars where no claws or teeth could be involved.

Having a cute girl living next door was enough to keep Jake awake throughout that winter. In the wild, bears hibernate during wintertime because of a lack of food. In captivity food is available all year round – so we let the bears tell us if they want to hibernate or not, depending on their own personality. Jake has always hibernated, but Oreo never had.

Come spring time, the powers that be at the zoo decided it was time to see how the two would get along without bars separating them. They waited till after hours so there wouldn’t be any crowds to distract the bears, and had all the zookeepers on hand with water hoses, noise makers, and dart guns incase a fight broke out.

Then, with everybody’s breath held in nervous anticipation, the gate was opened. Jake immediately walked into Oreo’s pen – and mounted her. They’ve been going at it ever since.

In case you’re wondering, there are three types of brown bear in Alaska: the Brown Bear -found in coastal areas (these are the ones that steal your fish from you), the Grizzly Bear - found in the interior of Alaska (like in Denali National Park), and the Kodiak Bear – found, amazingly enough, on Kodiak Island (these are the biggest of the brown bears). Scientifically, brown bears and grizzly bears are the same species, with the Kodiak bear being listed as a sub-species. Oreo is a brown bear and Jake is a Kodiak bear.

Jake and Oreo have been living together for many years now, and have gotten well used to each other. Jake even taught Oreo how to hibernate, so now they sleep the winters away.

He has also taught her to dig – that is why a brown bear has such long claws, after all. Unfortunately for us, she has really taken to this whole digging thing.

They used to have a nice wooded hill towards the back of their enclosure, but Oreo has dug at it to the point where it is now almost completely eroded away and all of the trees have died. We are trying to figure out what to do about that – but anything we put in there would just be demolished by her enthusiastic-ness.