Downsized but not dead. Food and shelter but no more wild nights. Those will be the trade-offs for two girl grizzlies moving from the vastness of Montana to the San Francisco Zoo.
It is, for sure, a radical change in lifestyle.
The orphaned sisters, accustomed to a range of up to 60 square miles, were captured in mid-September after rampaging through a ranch. Montana wildlife officials spent a week trying to find a home for them and had reluctantly decided death was the only option before the zoo offered refuge.
They'll probably arrive sometime this week -- the first grizzlies at the San Francisco Zoo since 1989. The adjustment process will be mutual.
"It's better than having them put down," said a relieved Terri Tew.
The bears' final days of freedom were witnessed by Tew, who lives outside Augusta, Mont., on a ranch that the ravenous grizzlies had begun to dismantle.
Their rap sheet spanned a three-week period.
For starters, the sisters opened the door to a calving shed and consumed 150 pounds of corn. A few weeks later, they broke into a barn.
"They just raised havoc," Tew said. "They flung things around, chewed on a 4-H banner, flattened a plastic garbage can."
The next day, they stripped some boards from the barn's exterior. Then they moved to the front yard, crunching bird feeders, digging up carrots, knocking a birdbath off its pedestal and tearing 50-pound feed blocks from a flatbed truck.
They also wolfed down the Tews' oat crop.
"They pooped all over the place," Tew said.
Her husband and a game warden were surveying the damage when the siblings suddenly materialized.
"They came out from the creek, screeched to a halt and took off," Tew said.
Bear traps were set, using grain and cookies as bait, at 6 that night. The first bear was nabbed 15 minutes later, the second soon after.
"They were that hungry," Tew said.
After being taken to the Montana Wildlife Center in Helena, their hunger problems ended and their housing problems began.
Michael Madel, a biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, blamed a scant food supply for the behavior of the bears -- whose mother was destroyed a year ago for similar tendencies, while her cubs were detained and released.
Although the bears are officially a year old, they're actually 18 months of age, teenagers in the ursine world.
"They are very attractive bears," said Madel, who captured them and brought them to Helena. "I've been working with bears for 25 years and these are two of the nicest-looking bears I've ever seen."
He said the bear now known as F-22 is chocolate brown with a golden hump, while her sister, F-21, is a "really beautiful blond."
The blond is more careful, more of a leader and much more nervous, he said, while her chocolate sibling is more laid back.
"F-22 likes to follow and watch," Madel said. "She rolled around in the grass at the center and went swimming. F-21 immediately wanted to escape and hit the hot wire."
The prognosis for life at the zoo?
"I think they'll do exceptionally well," said Madel, who pointed to their youth and to their equanimity while being detained last year.
In San Francisco, they'll settle into a lifestyle somewhere between Glacier National Park and death by lethal injection.
The sisters will live in a concrete enclosure last inhabited by a coyote. It is 61 feet wide and 50 feet long, and comes with a moat and a pool that's 9 feet deep.
"It's a bit small, but it's adequate," said senior zookeeper Tony Colonnese, who has worked at the San Francisco Zoo since 1971 and took care of bears -- including grizzlies Greg, Gracie and Granny -- for 12 years.
Zoo director Manuel Mollinedo would like to make the current enclosure three times larger, at a cost of $1 million, and eventually build a blockbuster exhibit up to five times as big, with a $7 million price tag, where the bears could be viewed underwater. He's getting ready to start a community fund-raising drive.
"The best bear exhibit is up at Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo," said Mollinedo, who likes its rocks and fish-filled stream. "If we build an exhibit here, I'll probably use that as a model. You really start to appreciate what they can do. In nature shows, they seem like lumbering creatures. But they're really very fast and very adept hunters."
For the past year, Colonnese has campaigned to get grizzlies back in the zoo. Given the uproar over two elephant deaths in the spring, he figured it would be a low priority.
"I thought it was a matter of civic pride," he said. "I brought in the state flag and waved it at one meeting."
Colonnese would cut down trees for his grizzlies, bury treats in wood chips, supply blackberry branches, put fish in their pool.
He predicts that the "Montana gals" will be playful and active -- eventually.
"You would expect they would have less trust of humans and more of that grizzly bear self-reliance," Colonnese said. "Grizzlies have a lot of self- respect. Some of these small tropical bears you can pet. Grizzlies have too much self-awareness. They wouldn't like you to pet them on the nose.
"Having been captured and recaptured, these bears probably don't have the best opinion of humans. We'll have to make friends with them."
He said adult bears need a daily food supply that's 3 percent of their body weight, and growing grizzlies require twice that much. The Montana sisters, now weighing 145 and 165 pounds apiece, will bring healthy appetites. Being grizzlies, they're omnivores.
"John Muir says they eat everything except granite," Colonnese said.
Many residents of western Wyoming used to think they ate that, too.
Karolis Bagdonas, a professor of biological sciences, runs a field research station there every summer near the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. He'd watch 30 grizzlies at a time overturn huge rocks and lick them. In 1988, he discovered it was not the result of a mineral deficiency.
"They were eating 25 to 40 pounds of moths in a sitting," Bagdonas said. "But they'll eat anything. You don't necessarily have to have moths for them."
He said one student doused a tent with bear spray, went for a hike and returned to find the tent eaten. On the other hand, grizzlies' eclectic tastes, though daunting, can also be helpful.
"Food is a major motivator in their lives," said Norah Fletchall, assistant director of the John Ball Park Zoo in Grand Rapids, Mich.
A female grizzly from Alaska and a male from Yellowstone now live at her zoo.
"Their transition just took a few days," she said. "You've got to remember that these animals in the wild are subject to a lot more stressors than we realize. Now they never have to worry about not having enough food."
In the autumn of 2000, Stacey Johnson relocated a home-wrecking black bear from Louisiana into the Fort Worth Zoo.
"Keeping the grizzlies occupied is going to be the biggest challenge," said Johnson, curator of the zoo's Texas Wild exhibit.
The Louisiana bear spent 30 days in quarantine, much like the Montana sisters will, and lived in the zoo's hospital, where he got a lot of attention. Then he was moved to a holding facility.
"The first couple of weeks were pretty hairy," Johnson said. "When he was bored, he tried to dismantle the building. Bears are really bright. And when you give them time to think, they will."
The black bear was sent back to the hospital until his exhibit was ready. Now he lives with another bear in a setting that simulates an abandoned logging camp. Johnson, always on a quest for novel stimuli, puts spices on their food, sprays cologne on rocks and trees, plants blackberry bushes.
"We don't go so far as to put a TV in there, but otherwise the sky's the limit," Johnson said. "None of the things we worried about, like trying to escape, ever happened. And providing a companion really helped. It'll make a big difference, the grizzlies being sisters."
* Original title: Rowdy gals face a tamer S.F. lifestyle: After escaping death, sister grizzlies are en route to zoo
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