Runaway bears steal honey and sleep it off

IN the fairy tale, Goldilocks enters the home of the three bears to eat their porridge and sleep in their beds. But at the Wildwood Devon conservation park in Britain, it’s the bears who are doing the breaking and entering - and sleeping.

Two young bears named Lucy and Mish escaped from their enclosure earlier this week and headed straight for their food store, where they gobbled up a week’s worth of honey before falling asleep, the park said on social media.

Upon learning about the two escapees, staff quickly escorted the 16 visitors on-site to a secure building, following the park’s “code red” protocol, said Mark Habben, the director of zoological operations at Wildwood Trust, the conservation charity that runs the park in southwest England. The police arrived, as did the emergency team armed with firearms, prepared for the worst, he said.

But the 5-year-old bears, much like most human 5-year-olds, appeared to want snacks more than anything else. The bears never made it beyond the staff-only food storage area, where park staff monitored them both on the ground and via CCTV until they voluntarily returned to their enclosure.

The food delivery had just arrived an hour before, Habben said in an interview, and the bears bypassed the vegetables to head straight for the sweet treats. “Just like kids,” he laughed.

The brother and sister plowed their way through the apples, bananas and peanut butter before discovering the honey. They ripped the lid off the plastic container and took turns dipping their paws into the golden goo, “making a right old mess,” Habben added.

With all the park’s carnivores, the keepers do what is called recall work with them to condition them to return to their enclosures, Habben said. Hence, Mish and Lucy understand to return at the sound of a bell that is followed by the sound of their enclosure door sliding open, Habben explained.

Mish immediately ran back into the enclosure at the sound of the door sliding open, Habben said, with Lucy following soon after at the sound of the bell. They then proceeded to romp around their enclosure in the throes of a sugar rush before promptly falling asleep in what appeared to be a sugar crash coma. “They’re naughty bears,” Habben said. “They’re very naughty bears.”

This sort of “incredibly inquisitive, playful and adventurous” behavior is fairly typical for Mish and Lucy, who are still considered young bears, said Paul Whitfield, the director general of the Wildwood Trust, in an interview. “Them doing exactly what they’re not supposed to is sort of what we expect from them.”

Mish and Lucy are European brown bears, which are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a species of least concern, although the group notes that “there are many small, isolated populations that are threatened.” In Albania, where Mish and Lucy were rescued, European brown bears are classified as vulnerable.

They were so young when they were found abandoned in a snow drift in the Albanian mountains that their rescuers had to bottle-feed them, according to Whitfield. Their rescuers tried to release them back into the wild after they were weaned “but all they did was look for the people who were trying to release them,” Whitfield said.

They arrived in Wildwood Devon in 2021, where they now live in a 1.5-acre natural enclosure where they can play and climb trees and be fed fresh salmon in the autumn in addition to the nuts and berries they receive year-round, Whitfield said, describing them as “incredibly pampered and spoiled bears.”

Mish and Lucy will soon be living with two more cheeky young bears. Malenky and Nanuq are 2-year-old siblings who were born in a sanctuary in Belgium to a mother bear who had been rescued from the conflict in Ukraine. They are currently living in a separate part of the enclosure, Habben said, and the keepers had been distracted watching them play with a tractor tire when Mish and Lucy made their great escape through a part in the enclosure that hadn’t been properly closed.

It’s unclear at the moment which sibling pair will be the worst influence on the other, given that Malenky and Nanuq’s main hobby at the moment appears to be digging up their pond and locating pipes in the concrete. “They are also very naughty,” Whitfield said. “It looks like we’ll have our hands full in the future.”