via YouTube
Kali the orphaned polar bear, seen here at only a few months old in an Alaskan zoo. Kali, who will soon move to St. Louis, is now 850 pounds.
Sorry, New York, but Kali the polar bear is bound for St. Louis.
Politicians in the Empire State have been petitioning to keep Kali there—either in Buffalo or in Central Park—since November 2013, when Kali (pronounced “Cully”) arrived at the Buffalo Zoo after being rescued by an Alaskan hunter. On Monday, U.S. Fish & Wildlife approved transferring the polar bear to St. Louis, which is opening its state-of-the-art polar bear exhibit in June.
Kali had a difficult start in life. An Inupiaq Alaskan hunter killed his mother before realizing she was nursing a cub. To rescue the orphaned polar bear, the hunter followed his mother’s tracks to a den 1,500 away, bundled the cub in a pair of ski pants and drove him in a snowmobile to Anchorage, according to the Anchorage Daily News. Kali stayed at the Anchorage Zoo until he was moved to Buffalo, which had another polar bear cub named Luna.
"Kali had a lot of issues," Buffalo Zoo president Donna Fernandes told Buffalo News when Kali first arrived. "He had chronic paw-sucking behavior and was very fearful of new situations -- not uncommon for animals with troubled beginnings."
Though St. Louis was always rumored to be Kali’s final destination, New York Senator Charles Schumer quickly began a campaign to keep Kali in Buffalo. He convinced the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service to keep the cub in Buffalo until he was two years old, the age when polar bears stop socializing with their families and become solitary.
"It's clear to me that if you do what's best for the bear itself, it would be to leave him in Buffalo," Schumer told the Buffalo News.
Even if Kali didn’t stay in Buffalo, New Yorkers hoped that Kali would move to the Central Park Zoo, where the beloved 27-year-old polar bear Gus died in August 2013. Michael Bloomberg, who was then New York’s mayor, told the New York Post that while Gus couldn’t be replaced, he hoped to bring another polar bear to the zoo.
“Gus was a great New Yorker and we all miss him, and it would be great to get another polar bear,” said then-mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio.
But St. Louis has won out over its New York competition, thanks in part to the Saint Louis Zoo’s new 40,000-square-foot, $15 million polar bear exhibit, called McDonnell Polar Bear Point, which opens June 6 next to the newly reopened penguin and puffin habitat. The new polar bear exhibit will more than double the amount of space in the former habitat, which housed polar bears from the 1920s until 2009.
