By admin SILT — This summer, Nanci Limbach has been getting by on a lot less sleep.
The executive director and founder of the Pauline S. Schneegas Wildlife Foundation is the only employee who handles after-hours arrivals at the organization’s wildlife rehabilitation center in Silt. The work is demanding in a normal year, particularly in spring, when orphaned and injured animals — namely fawns and raccoons — arrive in tiny, mewling masses.
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This year, the workload has extended well beyond the usual spring season, thanks to an influx of bigger babies: bear cubs. The facility is one of two wildlife rehabilitation centers licensed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife to care for bears that are orphaned, injured or too underweight to survive the coming winter.
This year, Limbach says, it seemed like most of the drop-offs came at night.
“So I have to open the security gates ’cause they’re already locked for the night. Then, I go out, find some lights to turn on, and get a cage ready. Find a water tub, find a food bowl, put some food in it, find some apples. And it’s like, the rest of the bears are looking at you, going, ‘What are you doing?’
“‘We’re bringing you another roommate.’”
By mid-October, 32 bear cubs were bunking up at the facility — with another expected from Paonia — nearly four times the center’s typical annual intake of five to nine cubs, and more than 10 times last year’s three. The cubs have come from across the Western Slope, including Aspen, Eagle, Paonia, Fruita, Loma, Meeker, Rangely and Steamboat Springs.
This year, the calls started coming earlier than usual, in May. Limbach attributes the early wave of struggling cubs to a hard spring freeze that damaged fruit and other natural food sources, followed by a summer of drought. With less forage available, she says, some mother bears brought their cubs closer to town in search of food; others were orphaned when their mothers were killed. For the rehab center, the result has been an unusually early and sustained influx of bears — and a race to get the cubs big and healthy enough to survive the winter.
It also has meant more than a few sleepless nights for Limbach, who just turned 70. She and her staff of three have had to reconfigure and expand enclosures, find new sources of food and keep 32 growing cubs both well-fed and active, giving them the chance to develop the behaviors — and body fat — they’ll need to survive in the wild.
Feeding 32 growing bears
The first challenge is keeping the cubs fed. To avoid habituating the bears to people, only Limbach or one of her two veterinary technicians enters their enclosures to put out food. First, they have to get the bears out of the way. They make a lot of noise or spray the bears with a hose, she says, sending them into their dens to hide until the food is in place.
The bigger challenge however, has been finding enough food — and paying for it. Limbach says the 32 cubs are going through about 2,000 pounds of fruit and 1,000 pounds of high-quality dog food every week. For nearly five decades, she has relied on donated produce and other food to feed the animals at the center. This year for the first time, she’s had to start paying for both fruit and dog food, in part because the same spring freeze that damaged the bears’ natural food sources also hit the fruit growers she relies on.
During peach season, a Palisade orchard donated two crates of peaches, each weighing 1,100 pounds. Now, Limbach says, the peaches are done and she’s trying to source apples, but supplies are limited.
“All the apples froze too, ’cause they’re on the same cycle as, say, oak brush is. So if the oak brush froze, so did the apples,” she said.
Even finding apples from out of state has proved difficult. When Palisade’s Talbott Farms offered to help source them, the grower struggled to find truckers willing to haul the fruit at current diesel prices. He eventually secured a shipment, Limbach said, and agreed to sell the foundation apples for 50 cents a pound and cover the trucking costs. One donor offered to pay for the fruit.
For years, Limbach could count on grocery stores to help fill the gap. She used to make the rounds of City Market, Safeway and other stores several times a week, picking up boxes of fruit. But about six or seven years ago, she said, the stores shifted to composting their unsold produce instead.
Now, she’s piecing together enough food to feed the bears from whatever sources she can find. The nonprofit food bank Lift-Up in New Castle sends over food left at the end of the week, though not all of it is usable. Community members have dropped off leftover squash from their gardens and acorns they’ve collected in their backyards.
Sunlight Mountain Resort recently donated carved Halloween pumpkins from its annual skier appreciation picnic.
“It was kind of sad seeing the pumpkins in there,” Limbach said. “It was like, ‘Oh, somebody didn’t keep their pumpkin. That’s really cute,’ you know, as the bear’s chomping away on it.”
Which cubs need rehabilitation?
By this time of year, bear cubs are around 10 months old. Most are weaned and, if they’ve found enough to eat, should be big enough to survive hibernation either with or without their mothers. But people who spot a cub on its own don’t always know that.
One of Limbach’s other duties is fielding calls from the public. This summer, she said, she was getting about three a day from people worried about bears. Only Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers can bring bears to the rehabilitation center, so the calls don’t necessarily mean another cub is on its way. It’s often just Limbach talking people through what they’re seeing.
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She’s even named her email address Bear Moon, after the January full moon she says is associated with when bear cubs are born. It’s a fitting name for someone who spends so much time explaining bear development to people who may be seeing a cub up close for the first time.
“They’ll call and say, ‘I have a baby bear in the backyard and it doesn’t have a mother.’ And it’s like, well, it doesn’t necessarily need a mother because it’s now headed to 10 months old,” she said.
Bears’ size depends largely on how much food they’ve been able to find. A cub that looks small for its age may be fine on its own. Others arrive at the center so underweight that Limbach is surprised they’re still alive.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife considers cubs old enough to fend for themselves after Aug. 15, Limbach said. By then, healthy cubs are generally weaned and able to survive without their mothers. The center takes in bears that are injured, orphaned or too small to make it through winter, not every cub spotted without an adult nearby.
This year, though, Limbach says she’s seen an unusual number of cubs that aren’t thriving. Some have been orphaned after their mothers were hit by cars or killed by people. In August, a mother bear was struck on Colorado 82 near Aspen. When officers arrived, they found two cubs. In New Castle, another cub was orphaned when its mother was shot with a bow and arrow. All three of those cubs are at the facility in Silt.
Other cubs, Limbach suspects, were brought closer to towns by mothers struggling to find enough food themselves.
“It’s almost like they take them to the edge of towns and say, ‘Here you go. I’ve shown you all the trash cans. You know where things are, and I’m out of here,’” she said.
Limbach wonders whether some mothers are making that choice because they don’t have enough fat reserves to sustain themselves through hibernation and raise cubs. She also thinks the poor forage year could affect how many cubs are born next winter. Female bears can mate during the summer, but the embryos don’t implant until later in the year, when a mother’s body condition helps determine whether a pregnancy proceeds. Limbach suspects some females may not implant any embryos this fall.
While precise reasons for all the underweight cubs vary, at the facility the work is the same: fattening up cubs with less than two months to get them ready for winter.
What happens next?
The goal is to get the cubs to about 55 or 60 pounds before they den, usually around the end of November. At the foundation’s satellite ranch on the backside of Sunlight Mountain at roughly 8,000 feet of elevation, the bears have denning enclosures where they can spend the winter.
The work doesn’t necessarily end when the weather turns cold, however. Cubs that won’t be able to rely on their fat reserves to get through hibernation will be fed at the facility through winter, with the hope of releasing them in early summer when there’s enough natural food available outside.
For the cubs that will be ready to hibernate this year, Colorado Parks and Wildlife staff help prepare the bears for winter, fitting them with identification tags and microchips before they go into their dens. In February, the cubs will be transported from the facility in Silt to natural snow caves, where they can finish out winter before emerging in March or April.
Accommodating so many cubs this year has meant expanding enclosures at the satellite facility and moving some bears there sooner than usual to free up space for new arrivals. Dozens of volunteers have helped build and enlarge cages, adding to the infrastructure the foundation needs to care for so many animals at once.
Limbach hopes this year’s influx won’t become the new normal. The only time she’s taken in a comparable number of cubs was some 30 years ago, when the total reached 39. After four decades of wildlife rehabilitation, she’s unfazed by the unpredictable demands of caring for wild animals, even the late night CPW drop-offs.
“As long as I’m out here and it’s 11:30 or midnight, I might as well feed (the animals),” she said. “And then I can sleep ’til 4. Your body just gets used to it.”