A nine-month old polar bear has stunned experts after being found nearly 450 miles south of her natural habitat in the Arctic.
The cub is now set to become the star attraction at a Russian zoo after being considered too young to survive on her own – only adding to the mystery of how she managed to wander so far away from her icy domain.
The young bear, which has been named Umka, trotted away from the ice and into the territory of brown bears, at a time where they are fattening themselves for hibernation and known to be at their most aggressive.
Scientists are ‘at a loss’ about how it managed to make it from the Siberian coastline to the Kolyma River, where she began living off scraps from a local fish factory.
A nine-month old polar bear has stunned experts after being found nearly 450 miles south of her natural habitat in the Arctic and by the Kolyma River
The polar bear -nicknamed Umka – was fed scraps of fish by local fisherman and has even been seen playing with dogs
Workers at the factory threw cast-off scraps and the bear, which is deemed too young to hunt alone, became content to stay and wait for the picnic, and even started playing with local dogs.
Originally experts believed the polar bear was around two years of age yet after she was tranquillised and inspected by vets it was found she was no more than nine months old.
Ivan Belonogov, a nature chief protection chief who supervised the rescue, said the bear would now become the star attraction to Orto Doidu zoo in the regional capital of Yakutsk.
The polar bear was thought to have had too much contact with human and is too young to survive on her own, according to Belonogov.
He told The Siberian Times: ‘The cub is not afraid of people, since the fishermen who found the bear fed her with fish.
The polar bear was thought to have had too much contact with human and is too young to survive on her own after wandering 450 miles away from her natural habitat
Originally experts believed the polar bear was around two years of age yet after she was tranquillised and inspected by vets it was found she was no more than nine months old
‘For now the condition of the cub is satisfactory, her appetite is good.’
One sinister theory is that the bear’s mother was shot by poachers who took the cub with them, hoping to sell it on the black market, but was later abandoned.
One rescuer said: ‘We simply don’t know how she made it here.
‘It is exceptionally rare for even adult polar bears to wander half this distance from the coast.
‘Perhaps this cub really has wanderlust, or there is a more macabre explanation.’
The polar bear will now become the star attraction at the Orto Doidu zoo in the regional capital of Yakutsk