A Mother’s Day Story So Sweet You May Not Be Able to Bear It

Remember how Mom used to rub soothing Vick’s Vapor Rub on your chest when you had a cold?

That’s what wildlife officials with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources slathered on three orphaned bear cubs to lull a female black bear – called a sow – into adopting them as her own, MLive/The Grand Rapids Gazette reports.

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The cubs were still nursing when their mother was killed by a car off U.S. 10 near Reed City last weekend. A bear’s natural instinct is to tree her cubs to keep them safe from danger, something the mother of these three woolly babies probably did as a precaution against the traffic that took her life, DNR wildlife technician Katie Keen said.

Before the 4-month-old cubs could be placed with the surrogate, they had to be retrieved from the 90-foot White Pine tree where they were roosting. 

Both DNR and local fire department personnel failed in their efforts to rescue the cubs, so the DNR called in some local tree service workers who scaled the tree and grabbed the baby bears, then loaded them into their backpacks for the trip down.

“"They've got a bite on them and some claws," Malcolm Vandentoom of Alpine Tree Service said, comparing their bite to that of a puppy. “The cubs were scared. They were trying to get away from us.”

Finding an adoptive mother wasn’t hard. The DNR has a network of surrogate sows, outfitted with GPS collars, they can call into service in instances like this. The wildlife management agency keeps close tabs on their reproduction and knew of a sow nearby who was still nursing her young.

The plan was to locate the sow, get her to send her own offspring up a tree and then send the orphans up after them.

But first they had to rub them down with Vick’s to cover their own smell.

It worked like a charm.

When the sow saw the approaching humans, she treed her cubs and left, just as DNR officials expected she would. The three Vick’s-covered orphans were coaxed up the trees.

“When we walk away, the sow comes back,” Keen explained. “When she gets her cubs to come down, she licks the new ones clean and they take on her scent."

And, presumably, everyone lives happily ever after.