A Minnesota bear that picked the wrong place to hibernate wound up stuck in the ice in a culvert alongside a road near Wannaska, leading to an ineffective and ill-advised rescue by a well-intentioned public.
Area residents discovered the stuck bear Sunday and attempted to dig the bear out that evening, as reported by TwinCities.com.
“We were going to go out there and take every precaution necessary, but basically we just wanted to dig it free enough so it could get out,” Spencer Krohn told TwinCities.com.
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Some “well-meaning folks” started to dig the bear out and tried to feed it before officials from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources arrived and blocked off the area as evening arrived.
Before then, the citizen rescuers had “served him up a smorgasbord of six Pop Tarts, a head of lettuce, a dead sucker minnow, some Fancy Feast cat food, bird seed and a Swedish fish,” DNR stated on its Facebook Page.
“That might work for ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ in Eric Carle’s book, but it’s no good for bears,” DNR wrote. “Luckily, because bears don’t have the desire to eat in the winter, the bear didn’t bite.”
The next morning, the bear was sedated by biologists and relocated to another den at the Thief Lake Wildlife Management Area in Marshall County.
The bear denned up in a culvert that began flowing during a recent warmup and became stuck when it tried relocating.
“He tried to push himself out and kind of got wedged on some frozen water that had frozen and thawed, frozen and thawed, and got stuck in place and tired,” Andy Tri, bear project leader for the DNR, told TwinCities.com.
Using a rope with “paw cuffs,” conservation officers spent 20 minutes to extract the drugged bear from its icy predicament.
Tri examined the bear and pronounced him healthy, estimated its age at 6 years and its weight at 375 to 400 pounds, and said it was a male.
“If you’re ever concerned about a bear’s safety by all means give us a call,” the DNR wrote on Facebook. “But don’t try to move it or feed it! Doing so can result in a bad situation (either for you or for the bear).”
Tri told TwinCities, “I was worried we’d have a sick bear mortally wounded or gravely injured or something like that. This is a happy story all the way around.”
Photos of the stuck bear, drugged bear and relocated bear courtesy of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.