This little bear cub caused quite a commotion when it wandered around downtown and up and down several trees near Sydney’s Frozen Custard on Friday, August 14. With hundreds of people looking on three Cook County Sheriff’s Deputies spent many hours trying to contain the cub so they could take it to a shelter. Sadly the cub eluded capture and ended up drowning. It washed up on shore on Sunday afternoon near the Lake Superior Trading Post.
Not even a hot dog attached to the end of a canoe paddle could lure a bear cub from the branches of a jack pine next to Sydney’s Frozen Custard in Grand Marais.
With as many as 300 people looking on, three Cook County Sheriff Deputies situated below the tree were ready with blankets and a leg snare as Sydney’s owner Bruce Block held an employee by the belt as he leaned out over the restaurant’s rooftop deck and offered the cub a hot dog, getting the morsel within a foot of the sniffing, panting, sometimes bawling baby bear.
The lure, however, failed to work, and shaking the branch only caused the cub to go further out on the limb where it hung 20-25 feet above a potential hard landing onto cement.
In the end the cub did crawl down, only to escape the clutches of the law and race off to climb another tree. The chase continued from tree to tree until the cub escaped to Artist Point at about 7 p.m. and the officers abandoned their rescue attempt at about 10:30 p.m. on Friday, August 14.
“We would have caught the cub if not for tourists getting in the way,” said deputy Julie Collman. “I had my hands on it several times but it slipped away. We were telling people to stay away but they wouldn’t. The cub was getting more anxious and more exhausted. He must have been up and down a dozen trees. At one time I was on one side of a tree and he was on the other. We were playing peek-a-boo and he was smelling my gloves, but I couldn’t get a blanket on him. It broke my heart when I learned that the little cub had drowned.”
Collman said the cub was spotted swimming way out in the lake and made its way to shore near the Best Western hotel beach where it lay exhausted on the ground until it was chased down the beach towards Sydney’s by some kids.
Employees at Red Pine Realty spotted the cub at about 2:30 p.m. Red Pine is located next to Sydney’s.
We heard that kids spotted the bear on the beach and chased it into the water,” said Red Pine Realty owner Mike Raymond. “We saw it swim ashore and climb a nearby spruce tree.”
With a large crowd gathering to observe the cub, Doug Anderson, a Realtor with Red Pine, called the local Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) office and asked for help, but when an employee showed up, he said because the cub wasn’t a threat to anyone, he advised leaving it alone so it could climb down and find its way back to the woods.
Still, with a crowd gathering on the street in ever greater numbers, three squad cars dispatched from the Cook County Law Enforcement Center came and police blocked part of the road to the U.S. Coast Guard Station and put caution tape around a perimeter to keep people away from the treed cub. Officers Will Sandstrom, Jason Hughes and Julie Collman spent hours trying to catch the bear, but despite their best efforts, the animal eluded them again.
Famed bear expert Lynn Rogers Ph.D, who is the chief researcher for the Wildlife Research Institute in Ely, said the cub, which was most likely orphaned, was old enough to make it in the wild if people would leave it alone and it could get back to a forested area.
Dave Ingebrigtsen, local DNR wildlife manager, was on vacation when the cub came to town. He said the DNR has few options in these cases. “We have no drugs available to us, and because the cub was so small, it might have been lethal to drug it anyway. I wouldn’t attempt to capture it in a blanket. One fellow in the West End caught one in his dog kennel, but the best thing to do is to leave it alone and it will eventually make its way back to the woods.”
Sadly, the cub’s body washed up on shore on Sunday, August 16, at 1:30 p.m. in front of the Lake Superior Trading Post, apparently drowning as it tried to swim back across the harbor from Artist Point.
“It’s a shame,” said Sheriff Pat Eliasen. “If only people could have left the cub alone, it might have survived. If we could have caught it, we had a place to take it. My officers gave it their best attempt. We would have liked to have had a better outcome.”
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