“They” being four yearling black bear cubs — two wearing GPS collars — just released from their metal crates after travelling three dusty, bumpy hours on the back of a truck. This haven is ideal for the youngsters not only because of its verdant cornucopia but also thanks to a lack of competition from other bruins. Driven out by the wildfire, many animals have yet to return here, Langen says.

When the crate doors open, three of the yearlings — Rose, Madame Min and Figaro — bolt as if ejected from a cannon. Rose scurries up a nearby tree then descends quickly, annoyed that the slender young pine isn’t high enough to provide a sense of security. Burly Kocoum, who managed to slip his GPS collar during the ride, takes his time ambling out of the crate, sniffing the air curiously before vanishing into the undergrowth. “It’s amazing how they just disappear into the wild,” says Langen.

For her, releasing rehabilitated yearling black bear cubs each spring never loses its thrill.

Langen and her husband, Peter, have been rescuing, rehabilitating and rewilding black bear cubs in British Columbia since 1990 and grizzly bear cubs since 2007 from their roughly 90-hectare spread. Run by a large contingent of volunteers and grad students as well as a handful of staff, the centre provides a fresh, highly varied diet to orphaned cubs, ensuring the bears are vigorous, fat and sassy upon release. The bears stay for up to 18 months in 10 expansive enclosures that include winter dens made of lumber, straw and branches, with natural enrichments such as logs and pools. To ensure the animals don’t become habituated to humans, only a few people feed them. 

Rose, Madame Min, Figaro and Kocoum are just four of 124 cubs released back into the wild last spring — a big jump from 75 the previous year. Drought and marauding wildfires meant the centre rescued a record number of starving and orphaned cubs in the fall and early winter of 2023 to rehab for a 2024 release.

The burgeoning number of bear cubs coming into Northern Lights’ care is worrisome and brings into question whether an increasingly climate change-scarred landscape can adequately support the young bruins in their new incarnation. In the wild, cubs aged 16 to 18 months already face a mortality rate of about 50 per cent. Will Rose, Madame Min, Figaro, Kocoum and the others have the same chance of survival? Or do their grim beginnings foreshadow a less successful life?

Unfortunately, 18 of the collars were too big for the young bruins, says Bialobzyski. The team could use only the small and medium-size collars, which resulted in an uneven sex ratio. Only 13 female bears, which are smaller and require a smaller home range, were collared, compared with 29 males.

Despite the challenges, the collaring initiative is still a golden opportunity for conservationists to learn more about bear rehabilitation. It’s “unusual for biologists to work on juveniles, [so] having a group like this is pretty unique,” says Schwantje, B.C.’s wildlife veterinarian emeritus who is globally respected for her decades of research on wild sheep and caribou. It’s a “tremendous data set.”

Schwantje sees the collaring as vital to determining whether Northern Lights’ rehabilitation efforts truly prepare bears for success in the wild. “Are we helping them, or just feeding them?”

Normally, cubs spend from one to two years with their mothers, a learning experience that “you can’t replace. We don’t know how they learn from their mom. We would need a camera to follow them 24/7,” she says. 

Schwantje also ponders whether the youngsters’ early deprivations will affect survivability. Most of the cubs were starved, orphaned and injured and it is uncertain whether they’ll grow into normal, healthy adults, she says.

The entire team hopes the collaring effort and data collection will answer another critical concern: will the cubs whose mothers were killed as nuisance bears follow in maternal paw prints and gravitate toward easy backyard pickings? “Will they simply get into human-bear conflict?” asks Schwantje. “Is it more humane to euthanize them?”

But beyond hunting, black bears are being killed as they enter municipalities in search of food. In Prince George, at least 76 bears were killed in 2023, more than double the previous yearly average of 35. Part of the problem, says Langen, is that Prince George “planted crab apple trees in the boulevards, and the fruit brings the bears in.” 

In Smithers, where Langen lives, 24 bears were killed that year. Langen recalls one resident who refused to remove the apples from her tree or install a fence. Instead, the woman shot the bears that came to her yard.

Easy access to a high-sugar food source like tree fruit also artificially fattens the females, sometimes causing mothers to birth three to four cubs at a time instead of the usual one or two. “This raises the number of bears that actually can’t be properly sustained by the amount of food that exists in the wild,” Langen says.

Langen says that there is an easy solution to these “nuisance bears”: eliminate fruit trees from communities or put unscalable fences around them. She started a program last year called Bear the Responsibility, to edu- cate people and municipalities on how to co-exist with bruins and how to deter bears from visiting fruit trees when they ripen in the fall, thus lowering the need to shoot the animals.

There’s evidence these deterrents work. Nelson, B.C., for example, urges citizens to pick the fruit off trees before ripening, to knock off spring blossoms to prevent fruit growing or, ideally, to replace fruit trees altogether. In 2023, Nelson reported only one bear fatality, down from 21 the previous year.