When Northern Lights Wildlife Society got a call about two baby black bears crying out for help from a hole in a tree, they immediately rushed to assess the situation. Once they arrived at the scene, the team of rescuers found that the babies were stuck 50 feet off the ground with no way of getting down on their own.
“They were just sitting up in the tree and crying … for their mom,” Angelika Langen, one of the founders of Northern Lights Wildlife Society, told The Dodo.
Unfortunately, the babies’ mama had passed away days before. If they’d been left waiting much longer, they wouldn’t have made it. So as the rescuers prepared to get the babies down, they knew time was of the essence.
“Those cubs had already been almost five days without a mom, which is kind of pushing it into a critical timeline,” Langen said.
The rescuers decided to call an experienced logging industry tree climber named Josh to come scale the tree. Josh found that the tree was completely rotten and therefore not safe to climb. At that point, it felt like all hope was lost.
But Josh came up with a brilliant solution — he decided to climb the much sturdier adjacent tree, secure himself to it, and then jump onto the rotten tree. Langen said that as soon as he so much as touched a branch on the rotten tree the cubs were in, the branch “came thundering down.”
As soon as he was able to get a secure foothold on the tree the cubs were in, he found himself faced with yet another obstacle — the babies were too far deep in their hole for Josh to be able to grab them. So the rescue team had to quickly give him a crash course on how to use a catch pole to grab the cubs.
In the end, Josh was able to use a combination of the catch pole and the rope to safely bring the babies down.
“We were, of course, over the moon down below,” Langen said. “Everybody that was watching was happy. It was quite the community effort to get those two cubs.”
It’s somewhat perplexing to imagine that a mama bear would choose to hide her cubs away up so high in a rotten tree. But according to Langen, bears prefer hiding their babies in rotten trees — since they’re hollow, they have plenty of room for the cubs. And bears don’t have as much trouble climbing trees as humans do.
Josh and his family decided to name the cubs Orion and Nester. The pair is already thriving at Northern Lights Wildlife Society.
“They’re doing really well. They’ve settled in really well. They’re eating well,” Langen said.
Northern Lights Wildlife Society will care for Orion and Nester for a year, and then once they reach the age when they would have naturally become independent from their mother, they’ll be released back into the wild.