‘Filled his belly’: Northern Alberta woman recalls finding underweight bear cub in backyard deck box

A black bear cub rescued from a Slave Lake deck is now in the care of an Alberta animal rescue.

Tannis Fiddler lives on an acreage just outside the town of Slave Lake, Alta., so when she and her husband first saw a bear cub in a tree in their backyard, they assumed it was business as usual.

“We’re very familiar with seeing bears in the fall … I always knew to put the bird food away and pick crab apples off the tree, get things cleared off so that they didn’t have a reason to come in,” Fiddler said in an interview Friday.

During a brief winter warm-up in the area in the middle of January, her husband, Ben, texted to inform her that the cub was getting opportunistic.

“He was like, ‘The bear is in our tree, and he’s eating all of your bird food,” she recalled. “He had managed to balance himself on the tiniest little branch and proceeded to consume all of the feed I had … he went through all of my bird feeders, filled his belly.”

The couple thought it was cute, snapped a few photos and assumed the cub would be on its way. A few days later, however, her dog, Winston, “freaked out” by Fiddler’s deck box out back, where, incidentally, she kept the rest of her expensive bird feed.

“I heard a sound, like a breathing sound that came from the deck box. And I was like, pardon my language, but I was like, ‘Oh sh*t. It’s in there,’” she explained.

Alone save for Winston, who had been placed in the house because he was “not being productive,” Fiddler carefully lifted the lid of the deck box to verify her hunch.

“Sure enough, it was sleeping in a little corner … he had carved out a little spot for himself,” she said.

“He looked up at me, then put his head back in and curled up into a ball.”

It was then that the Fiddlers called Alberta Wildlife as they suspected the cub was attempting to make a den.

It was picked up within a couple of days, weighing in at just 12.5 kilograms (28 lbs) upon being brought to a conservation centre in Madden. Staff suspect the cub was orphaned and had been digging through crusted snow, fighting to eat.

“I think we saved his life a little bit,” Fiddler added of her bird feed.

“We’re really grateful that (Wildlife staff) were able to respond and that there was a place that was able to take him … until he’s a better, healthier weight and can go back out into the wild.”

And while she’s not opposed to a little “fuzz ball” as a pet, she does hope the cub doesn’t remember her house as the hangout with the good, expensive bird feed.