On a hot, late morning, Siku and Baffin are all over the enclosure, ‘which is another sign they’re thriving’
The Calgary Zoo’s Komodo dragons would happily, deeply breathe in Calgary’s summer heat wave.
But a few enclosures away, the zoo’s two male polar bears are kept cool and hydrated by a welcome gauntlet of chilling apparatus.
On one end of his two-acre enclosure, eight-year-old Siku luxuriates under an overhead misting spout before ambling across a rock-bound creek and into the sun-splashed main water tank that’s kept at a temperature no higher than 17 C.
There, he roughhouses with fellow polar bear Baffin, 7, as a mob of visitors thrills to their antics amid a temperature pushing 30 C.
When they leave the pool and begin feeling the heat, they can cool down under two other sprinkler-type stations that, for now, operate continuously.
“They will be bear-activated, there’s a plate the bears can push for spray,” said Alison Archambault, the Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo’s director of brand and engagement.
“But right now, the bears are new to us and are still learning about the seasonal aspects of their habitat.”
On a hot, late morning, Siku and Baffin are all over the enclosure, “which is another sign they’re thriving,” she added.
Orphaned bears experiencing first summer in Calgary
The bears were discovered separately as one-year-old orphans in the Churchill, Man. area and relocated to Winnipeg’s Assiniboia Zoo, from where they transferred to the Calgary Zoo last October.
During their first winter in Calgary, the pair frolicked during the city’s deep freeze cold spells, said Archambault.
“In -40 C, they’d be in the plunge pool, break the ice and play with it,” she said.
Now, with temperatures almost reversed, the shaggy white bruins enjoy the run of their enclosure, where they can retreat to a huge shade structure, a climate-controlled room and a smaller cold pool.
On the hottest days, their diet of fish, fruit and vegetables take on a treat vibe, said Archambault.
“Many of the animals receive popsicles, regular food surrounded by ice,” she said.
Even the pea gravel that blankets parts of the enclosure can be a cooling agent, she added.
Ideally, the pair would be thriving in the wild but being orphaned means they didn’t have that choice, said Archambault, and in their captive surroundings will likely live into their 20s — years longer than their natural lifespan.
And climate change is making those lives in the wild more challenging by reducing the volume of ice floes the animals rely on for hunting, she said.
“In the wild, they have a reduced time on the ice and they’d be fasting for six months but here, they’re not fasting,” said Archambault.
“If I was fasting, I wouldn’t be walking around and playing with balls.”
Zoo looks to remain adaptable
Nearby where the zoo’s king penguins are sequestered, the birds are definitely not strutting their stuff outside their enclosure, something they do from January to March, said Archambault.
“They don’t come outside, they’re in a climate-controlled area . . . penguins have a sprinkler system,” she said.
Other species, like the zoo’s Humboldt penguins, aren’t so sensitive to the heat and are out in the elements, noted Archambault.
The zoo’s polar bear cooling techniques have taken a page out of other zoos’ books but aren’t written in stone for an enclosure that was 26 months in the making, she said.
“If there’s something that needs to be changed, we’ll do that,” said Archambault.
In the meantime, she said, those who care for the polar bears, penguins and other creatures are making sure they also beat the heat, which is expected to remain in the high 20s C and low 30s C range for the next week.
