Back from the dead
On the morning of Tuesday, July 21, a resident on Manzanita Road reported a strange sight: a bear cub hanging by its paws from a tree branch 30 feet up. The cub’s back legs appeared to be completely inert, as if it had suffered a back injury.
Mammoth Lakes Wildlife Specialist Steve Searles was first on the scene, and found not only the one bear cub now dangling by its legs, but the mother and second cub watching from lower in the tree. He called Mammoth Lakes Police Department (MLPD) Sergeant Marc Moscowitz.
Both men—and other witnesses—agreed that the cub appeared to be traumatized, perhaps either hit by a car or attacked by a male bear, and that it didn’t have long to live.
“Even with all his experience and my experience, we’d never seen anything like that,” Searles said.
Pretty soon MLPD Chief Al Davis arrived to take a look, then Mammoth Lakes Fire Department (MLFD) Chief Frank Frievalt. When Searles proposed climbing up a ladder to check on the dangling cub, Chief Frievalt had a better idea: bring in an MLFD ladder truck with a 100 foot aerial platform and hydraulically powered ladder, to allow Searles to assess the situation from above rather than below.
“The intent was to give Steve a bird’s eye view so he could decide whether to euthanize the cub,” said Chief Frievalt. “We provided him a little different view, and hopefully a safer one.”
MLFD drove the ladder over and carefully backed it into the lot, then raised the platform with Searles and several firemen. Firemen eventually used a pole to pull the cub up and back onto the branch, although Searles and Chief Frievalt said no one thought the cub would survive. In fact the cub’s mother must have thought the same, as she and her remaining cub left the tree and the scene.
“Steve [Searles] made the decision that everyone could go away and he would come back and check on the cub later,” said Bill Sauser, whose property is adjacent to the tree. Sauser said the mother came back several times to check on the cub, but that it still appeared to be dead.
Sauser thought no more of it until, at about 10:30 or 11 o’clock at night, “I heard the bear screaming for its mama,” he said. “Whatever ailed the bear … it got over it.”
Searles also happened to hear the cub from down the street, and came over to investigate. According to both Searles and Sauser, the cub climbed down from the tree, and was completely ambulatory; nothing appeared to be wrong with it.
However, with its mother vanished, the cub continued to climb out of and into the tree, alternately searching for its mother and calling out until the early hours of the morning.
Sauser said that in the morning he saw the cub move in a series of acrobatics from one tree to another tree four over. “I found it just amazing that that was the cub from the day before,” he said. Eventually the cub departed; Searles said he last saw it on Old Mammoth and Sherwin St. The cub can go about four days without milk, but will not survive without his mother, so its fate will be determined in the next 48 hours.
Searles’ hope is that he’ll be able to reunite the mother and the cub.
On Thursday afternoon, Sauser saw what might have been the mother bear returned to the tree. Her second cub wasn’t with her. That cub may have been killed by an aggressive male bear that killed another cub earlier this summer in order to mate with the mother.
“Again, MLPD and MLFD worked really well together, and brought state of the art equipment to help a bear cub,” Searles concluded of the experience.
Chief Davis agreed that Tuesday’s events demonstrated a successful collaboration between departments. “Overall, this event just shows that everyone here in town has the best interest of our wildlife in mind,” he said. “I thought it was a great collaborative effort between Steve and us and the Fired Department, thinking outside of the box.”
Meanwhile Chief Frievalt concluded that “Cats out of trees I’ve never done, but it’s Mammoth… ” so perhaps it was time to get a bear out of a tree, instead.
