What’s Up With Siku?

/ Post by Janne, Siku’s caretaker at the Scandinavian Wildlife Park

Siku is now 10 months and three weeks old, and weighs 94 kg!

The park closes for the winter on October 21st, so we have started getting Siku ready for this. First of all he isn’t going to have food as often, so we have now reduced his number of feedings to three times during the day. In the morning he gets 700 g of cow heart. Then at about 11 he gets a whole leg from a cow calf and that takes him a couple of hours to eat, because he has to pick the meat from the skin and bones himself. This is a great enrichment activity for him, and he gets about 1.5 kg of meat from that. Then when the park closes at 5 pm., he gets his dog food, about 200 grams, and then 700 g of cow heart. That amounts to about 2.9 kg of meat every day and on top of that he still gets the occasional apple.

Soon he will also start sleeping alone, so we have moved further away from him, still sleeping in hearing distance from him, but he doesn’t know that we can hear him. We haven’t seen or heard anything from him in reaction to this, and that means that again he is completely ready for the changes that we are presenting him with.

On top of trying a whole leg from a calf for the first time, he also got his first fish the other day. When presented with both the leg and the fish, he didn’t hesitate for one second. He sniffed it, licked it one time, picked it up and placed it in his favorite eating spot, and started eating. The leg takes him a couple of hours to eat, and then there is still the skin and bones left to play with. The fish went down in 15-20 minutes, with no trace of it ever being there, other than a happy polar bear licking each straw of grass and his paws, to make sure that not a drop was wasted.

There have been some questions about Siku being alone in the enclosure and I thought that I would try and clarify the situation. Siku is being hand raised because his mother didn’t produce any milk and having no siblings means that he has to be alone in his enclosure. There are no other cubs available for him to play with, and all adult bears are too big and dangerous for him at this age. Usually the cubs will stay with their mother, seeing only her and their possible siblings, for the first two to two-and-a-half years of their life. The mother is there to protect the cub and make sure that he gets something to eat, but she would not be constantly playing with the cub or entertaining him all the time.

So a cub like Siku is actually perfectly fine playing and exploring on his own, as long as he is safe and fed, and we of course make sure that Siku is just that. Siku sees the other polar bears every day through the fence in the enclosure that he is in when the park is closed for the night. We have an older female that has access to the stable in the opposite pen of where Siku is sleeping, and outside of the stable, the other three polar bears are just on the other side of the fence. Siku is very curious about the other bears, sitting and watching them for long periods of time, and they mostly ignore him. He keeps a bit of a distance to the fence still, especially if the adult bears are close on the other side. They are still three to six times the size of him, so of course he is going to be a bit cautious around them, but he is a confident little bear and if the other polar bears react to him, he stands his ground, telling them how big he thinks he is. The plan is that he is going to be introduced to the others individually and without a fence, when he is about two years old. Then he will weigh about 200 kg and be big enough to handle being around the other polar bears.

Some have asked if we are planning a birthday celebration for Siku, and the answer to that is NO! Siku is a polar bear, and birthdays mean nothing to him, so he will just have another regular day. Maybe his keepers will have a piece of chocolate with their coffee that day but that is it. We do have a birthday suggestion, though: If you want to celebrate that Siku turns one year old on November 22nd, make a plan to change something in your everyday life that would benefit the climate and Siku’s wild cousins. That would be the perfect gift for Siku!

Siku’s wish is to reduce your carbon footprint to save his wild cousins. Ready to help? Visit our Take Action! page. Photos copyright Søren Koch.