When John Stark looks out on the fenced-in compound, he doesn’t see 2.7 acres of trees, pools, boulders and shrubs.
He sees a palace.
“I call it the Bear-Mahal,” the B.C. Wildlife Park business and development manager said.
“There’s the Taj Mahal. Well, this is the Bear-Mahal because it’s an amazing thing.”
Beginning this Victoria Day long weekend, visitors to the park will get a look at the enclosure’s rare resident who made it all happen.
Clover the Kermode is making his debut.
The blond black bear, rare in the wild and the only one of its kind in captivity, came to the park three years ago, but has been mostly out of view as a special $800,000 enclosure was built to house him.
Stark said the wildlife park plans to eventually put its other three black bears into the new habitat as well, but the process will be slow and lengthy. For now, Clover is living without roommates.
On a visit to the park earlier this week, KTW was able to catch a glimpse of the Kermode, also known as a Spirit Bear, as he lounged in the concrete denning area at the edge of the public viewing pen.
A small cub when he first arrived, Clover is now a whopping 330 pounds — so big, Stark said, that even his keepers were surprised when they weighed him during his transfer to his new home last week.
Stark said the bear is being introduced to the new area slowly, but should be roaming his new home freely this weekend.
“What they want to make sure is, when he goes out into this large, 2.7-acre area, which I’ve never seen anything like in the world, he might just stay out here for a while and not want to come back in,” Stark said.
“So, he’s really got to know where he’s going to be fed all the time.”
The new habitat is still a work in progress.
While Clover’s portion is ready to go, along with a viewing platform for the public, only phase one of the project is complete.
Phase two will include a second wheelchair-accessible viewing platform on the other side of Clover’s enclosure, where the second of two pools connected by a stream is installed, along with several shady spots for the bear to escape the summer sun.
The water features will be spots to watch as Clover settles in.
“He loves his water,” Stark said.
Also in the works is an interpretive centre explaining Spirit Bears.
The bruins are culturally significant for First Nations people on the central and north coast of the province, the only place Kermodes are found. They are also B.C.’s provincial mammal and illegal to kill.
It’s that fact that saved Clover.
Orphaned as a cub, Clover became habituated to humans and previous attempts to relocate him away from people failed.
While a normal black bear would have been put down as a pest, he was sent to Kamloops.
The move wasn’t without controversy.
Animal-rights group Lifeforce set up a petition demanding the bear be freed, which attracted national media attention — but only about 900 signatures.
Stark said it’s been some time now since the park has heard from Lifeforce.
“I give it to Glenn [Grant, general manager of the park]. He’s done such a good job of getting the message out there of why the bear’s here,” Stark said.
“It was without a doubt the best thing for the bear. The bear would probably not have survived. Probably somebody would have ended up shooting it — which is totally against the law in British Columbia, but they’d say, ‘Oh, he was attacking me. He was in my yard ripping my garbage apart’.”
Today, Clover is attracting international attention for different reasons.
More than 25 busloads of Californian tourists will stop overnight in Kamloops this summer, hoping for a glimpse of the unusual bear.
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