Meet the polar bear at Assiniboine Park Zoo not seen by the public

Posted on November 28, 2024 by Peggy

Assiniboine Park Zoo is home to several polar bears available for the public to observe any day of the week, but there’s one bear at the zoo no visitor has been able to see and her name’s Agee.

“She really loves nest building,” said Caitlin Gordon-Hall with Assiniboine Park Zoo.

“We give her whole pieces of straw, and she breaks it up into a million pieces and makes her own nest to sleep in. She also uses cardboard to do that.”

Unlike most of the polar bears in the Assiniboine Park Zoo, Agee wasn’t found as an orphaned cub in northern Manitoba.

She came from a private owner in B.C. who could no longer care for her.

“So just moving across the country was a scary thing,” said Jackie Enberg, animal care curator at Assiniboine Park Zoo

“And living in a new place for anybody, any animal can be a scary thing.”

Zoo staff are doing everything they can to make Agee comfortable.

She’s 29 years old, turning 30 in January, which is a senior citizen for a polar bear, and she’s starting to slow down a little.

“We noticed she was taking very careful steps into the building and taking kind of a different route than she needed to,” said Gordon-Hall.

The zoo’s staff decided she needed a little extra help, so they built stairs for her, which are specially designed for a polar bear with greater width on top.

“it’s reinforced, heavily reinforced underneath so it can take the weight of an adult polar bear,” Enberg said.

The stairs were installed right before the snow came, and Agee really seems to like them.

“Since she got the stairs, she’s been just like going up and down those stairs every day,” said Gordon-Hall.

“It’s quicker for her to come in when we ask her to come in, and it’s been working out amazing overall.”

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