A day with wild animals
Although born in America, Jane was smuggled into Italy as a youngster. She spent her days chained up outside a pet shop in Palermo, entertaining passersby. If you've ever been to Palermo, you know it's not a good spot for country folk. So bustling it makes New York City look quiet, Palermo's the kind of city where people drive their cars on the sidewalk.
It's definitely no place for a bear.
The guide walking us through Wildlife Images, a rehabilitation and education center for wild animals native to Oregon located an hour from Ashland, just north of Grants Pass in the town of Merlin, tells us that some animal rights activists saw Jane Bear and made arrangements to send her back to America.
But there was a catch: American customs officials weren't interested in accepting another black bear.
"Don't underestimate the tenacity of Sicilians," Dennis Kelley, our guide and one of the 100 volunteers who work at Wildlife Images, said. I nodded more vigorously than the others (my mother-in-law's family is from Sicily). So the Italians had the Americans swear in Jane Bear as a citizen of the United States and issue her a passport, paw print and all. The ploy worked and customs officials let her come home.
Jane Bear was so small she was thought to be a juvenile. Until her stomach was X-rayed as part of a routine medical exam given to animals that come to live permanently at Wildlife Images. The X-ray revealed her stomach was packed with candy wrappers, cigarette butts, pen caps, and other debris you'd find on a Palermo sidewalk. Although she gained weight once the garbage was removed, Jane, who I saw when visiting Wildlife Images with my 8-year-old daughter's third-grade class last week, will always be smaller than average.
Every animal at Wildlife Images has a story as interesting, and often as tragic, as Jane's. We learn about one-eyed bald eagles (relying on keen eyesight to hunt, a one-eyed eagle cannot make it in the wild) and a baby badger named Nubs who was found, with two other cubs, trying to nurse on the dead body of his mother, who had been hit by a car.
We titter when Kelley tells us about Ruby, a beloved raccoon who lives by herself in a two-room condo connected by a tunnel. A plum tree grows outside her residence. Ruby feasts on the plums all summer; still, the uneaten ones quickly ferment. Ruby doesn't mind them that way but the staff and visitors can tell when she's had one two many. "She stays hammered all summer," Kelley says, adding that she starts to swagger when she walks and does silly things like hang upside down.
The most fascinating animal we saw was a cougar. When my kids run ahead of me as we're walking in the woods above Ashland, I often think they look like the perfect tasty treats for mountain lions, but I'd never seen one this close. These cats are huge; this male weighed 160 pounds. According to the guide, he's seven times stronger than a human, can jump 20 feet straight up in the air and kill prey with a single bite of his powerful jaws.
On the noisy bus ride back to school, the kids all talked at once. "I liked how the raccoon eats plums and she got drunk in the summer," said 9-year-old Eve. "I liked seeing the grizzly bears," my daughter Hesperus said. Kyle was most fascinated by Ruby's retractable thumbs.
"And you're going to say that Kyle was in front of us and we kept poking him," Hesperus shouted, doubling over with laughter.
"You want me to write that?"
"Yep, um hum!" Hesperus cries. Black bears, cougars, raccoons, and 8-year-old homo sapiens — all fascinating creatures with interesting behavior patterns. I'm glad I got to spend the day with them.
