they escaped their enclosure<\/a> and made a beeline for the staff area, eating a whole week’s worth of honey.<\/p>\nNow the siblings, who live at Wildwood Devon, are being slowly introduced to Syrian brown bear twins Malenky and Nanuq, in the first of a series of carefully planned play dates.<\/p>\n
Jon Forde, head of bears at Wildwood Trust, said the first meeting went well but they were “not out of the woods yet”.<\/p>\n
Mr Forde added: “We’ll be watching carefully to ensure they haven’t been hatching any escape plans.”<\/p>\n
Wildwood Trust said the meeting was “filled with vocalisations and interactions”, with the cautiously curious bears taking part in “bouts of play-fighting and nose-to-nose greetings”.<\/p>\n
The mother of the twin cubs had been rescued from war-torn Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Becky Copland, animal behaviour management officer, said: “Playmates give bears the chance to form bonds, explore and learn essential behaviours – all while keeping them mentally stimulated and happy in a safe environment.”<\/p>\n
Like their new playmates, Lucy and Mish are rescue bears – in their case saved a snow drift in the Albanian mountains in 2019.<\/p>\n
The introduction comes just months after a similar process at Wildwood’s Kent park.<\/p>\n
Three-year-old Boki was reintroduced to his neighbouring playmates Fluff and Scruff after recovering from brain surgery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two brown bears living at a wildlife park in Devon have been introduced to a pair of new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-86176","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}