Baby Polar Bears at the Buffalo Zoo

By Vicky Nardone

This past Saturday my mom and I went to visit the Buffalo zoo with a group of friends from our local theater group.  One of the guys in the group is a docen at the zoo which means he gives tours and answers questions and things of that nature so he gave us a guided tour around the zoo.

The zoo has a special exhibit going on now with two baby polar bears - Luna and Kali (pronounced KUL-LEE).  The babies are only here for a short time because the exhibit isn't built to hold adult polar bears.  But they are working on building a big new bear exhibit that would be able to hold them and it will hopefully be ready sometime in 2015.

Kali, the male, was the more introverted of the two.  Here he is sucking his thumb.  He has sort of a sad story.  His mom was shot by an alaskan hunter.  The hunter went into the cave and found Kali and felt really bad because he didn't realize that she had babies.  He called the nearest zoo who came in and rescued Kali.  Eventually he got brought to Buffalo.

Luna, the female was such a little star!  She was doing tricks the whole time we were there!  She would jump on her blue floaty thing and get out of the water and dive back in.  All the separated us from her was some plexi glass.  There was this adorable little girl who went right up to the glass and Luna jumped at her and scared her and the poor thing went running back to her parents.  She was born from a polar bear at another zoo and everyone was commenting on how different she and Kali were in personality.  The fact that she was born in captivity and he was born in the wild probably has something to do with it.

Anyway, it was so much fun getting to see them.  If you're in town they are the cutest things and I highly recommend going to see them and checking out the rest of the zoo.  They have an awesome rainforest exhibit that's totally worth seeing too.