A quite rare event in our Bears-fight-Bears world ... and the "adoptee" was a Grizzly cub too.
Simply amazing.
In wildlife rarity, 'supermom' grizzly sow adopts yearling in Katmai
by Megan Edge, Alaska Dispatch News, adn.com -- Sep 15, 2014
Abandoned by his mother and seemingly left for dead, a yearling grizzly bear cub at Katmai National Park and Preserve has been adopted by another female bear in a turn of events that seems more like it belongs in a Disney movie than in the wild.
[...]
Holly is officially known as brown bear 435. She is described as a sometimes "nervous mother'' known for taking her cubs into trees for protection and nursing a yearling with a broken leg back to health. But she topped that this year when she fed the male yearling along with her own 9-month-old biological cub, whose gender is as yet unknown.
[...]
The
NPR report on this unusual animal adoption, said that Holly, in addition to teaching it how to fish, has start to nurse the xeno-cub too.
As if it was one of her own ...
Holly apparently sees the world differently, than your 'average bear' ...
So, why'd she do it?
Adopt another's bear, not of her own gene-line?
Experts are uncertain ...
Maternal Brown Bear Adopts Abandoned Cub in Alaska Preserve [with Video]
by Matt Knox and Faryn Shiro, via Good Morning America -- Sep 18, 2014
Park rangers said Holly took in a brown bear cub that likely would have died after he was abandoned by his own mother, who left him to run off with a male suitor. Park rangers said the cub would wait for hours at a time at the waterfall where his mother left him.
Holly noticed the cub and cared for him, and now raises him as her own.
“It is a very rare event in the bear world,” Mike Fitz, a park ranger, told ABC News. “It is really wonderful to see this so unique event.”
[...]
Link to Video
“It could be just a maternal instinct of the mother," he said. "The bottom line is we are not sure why she did it.”
[...]
If only human beings could learn to be so magnanimous and caring ...
as "Holly" the 'supermom' Brown Bear ...
What a better world it would ultimately be. So much so, we could probably 'barely' stand it.