When Ishŭng arrived at Eureka’s Sequoia Park Zoo five months ago, she weighed in somewhere between 475 and 500 pounds — more than double the average weight for a healthy adult female black bear. After acclimating to her spacious new home and adopting a more nutritious diet, our extra fluffy girl has dropped an estimated 100 pounds. Give it up for Ishŭng, y’all!

Before she was placed at the Sequoia Park Zoo by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) in late March, three-year-old Ishŭng lived in subpar conditions — a sparse 16’ by 16’ exhibit with a water tub and few enrichment items — at an unnamed animal sanctuary in another part of the state. The facility’s permits were revoked by the CDFW earlier this year due to animal welfare concerns, and their animals were relocated.

“There were also concerns about animal husbandry, and they weren’t meeting the necessary standards,” Sequoia Park Zookeeper Erin Corrigan told the Outpost. “They were offered opportunities to rectify those problems, and they either weren’t able to or chose not to. Eventually, their permits were not renewed.”

Not surprisingly, the sanctuary wasn’t good at keeping records, Corrigan said, which made it impossible for the CDFW to determine how Ishŭng ended up at the facility in the first place. Knowing next to nothing about her medical background, zoo staff had to draw their own conclusions as to how Ishŭng reached nearly 500 pounds. 

“We don’t know for a fact that her whole world revolved around feeding times — which is something that can happen in zoos when your animals are just kind of sitting there waiting to be fed — but we can make assumptions,” Corrigan said. “We don’t know exactly what they were feeding her, but we can assume that it wasn’t nutritionally complete. She just didn’t have a whole lot of space to move around, and didn’t have much stimulation that encouraged her to be active.”

A bear’s weight can vary wildly depending on the time of year. Female American black bears tend to weigh between 100 and 300 pounds, according to the CDFW. At 384 pounds, our Ishŭng still has a ways to go before she hits her target weight.

“She is overweight, but, as far as her frame goes, she is petite. If you look at her in comparison to our big male, Tule, who actually isn’t that big for a male, you can see that her frame, the length of her legs, the size of her feet and her face are actually petite,” Corrigan said. “We don’t really have a goal number for her; it’s more of a range. She’s the one leading us, and we’re thinking she should be in the higher 180- to 250-pound range — maybe 300 at the highest.”

As it turns out, Ishŭng is a very picky eater. She isn’t too keen on vegetables — bless her heart — but she’s starting to come around a bit, Corrigan said. When she first arrived at the zoo, staff quickly learned Ishŭng “really, really loves” romaine lettuce, and she’s grown to like green bell peppers as well.

“We’ve offered her zucchini in the past, but she’s mostly rejected it,” Corrigan said. “I just tried to feed her a zucchini again, and she’s like, ‘Nope, still garbage.’ She likes carrots and sweet potatoes, but beets are also absolutely garbage. If beet juice gets on any of the other food, that food is also garbage. … She does like citrus, grapes and blueberries, and she’s started eating apples as well.”

The bears are also given two different kibbles that are formulated specifically for bears and omnivores, Corrigan added. Every other day, the bears are given a “direct protein item” that staff hide around the exhibit to encourage foraging. 

“She really likes ground beef, steelhead trout, smelt fish, and we’ve recently given her small prey items that we have in-house for some of our other animals, like small mice,” she continued. “She really liked those.”

All told, Ishŭng has adapted quite well to her new home. She’s still getting used to living in a wide open space — a world much different from where she was before. “We don’t know if she’d ever seen trees before,” Corrigan said. “We don’t know what she was exposed to.” Now, she’s getting exercise, playing with sticks and hanging out in the little river that runs through her habitat. She’s also become a bit of a soccer star.

“She really likes soccer,” she said. “We have these small, hard plastic balls that we use as enrichment items for the bears, and most of the time we put food inside of them and they have to move the item around to get the food to fall out. Ishŭng hasn’t really been able to figure that out, but she loves to just play with the ball and push it around.”

Ishŭng is currently separated from the zoo’s male bears, Tule and Kunabulilh. Tule, who is roughly the same age, was placed at the Sequoia Park Zoo with another bear cub, Noni, in 2023. (Unfortunately, Noni died last year after an emergency surgery.) Kunabulilh, known as “Nabu” among zoo staff, was relocated to the zoo two months ago and is still “behind the scenes.” 

Zoo staff are working to integrate Ishŭng and Tule, but it’s a slow process to ensure both bears’ safety. “They are the ones who are leading us,” Corrigan said, “and we don’t want to push them too hard or cross any boundaries that they have kind of established.”

“They have two sections of habitat — the backyard and the front yard — and we can easily move the animals between the two spaces, sometimes multiple times a day,” she continued. “They do sleep in the same night house. There is a chain link fence in between them, but they do sleep in there together.

It’s worth noting that all three bears — and Noni, too — were considered “non-releasable” by the CDFW due to physical impairments that would make it difficult, if not impossible, to survive in the wild. While zoo staff have little information about Ishŭng’s medical history, they know Tule and Nabu were both sick when they were found by CDFW. 

“Most, if not all of our native animals are non-releasable,” Corrigan added. “We have our bald eagles, our ravens and our spotted owl in the raptor aviary, and all of those animals were born wild and were injured and are not releasable due to their injuries. We have the ability to offer these animals homes so that they can survive and live a healthy life. They can also be ambassadors for their species.”

Asked about other exciting zoo happenings, Corrigan said the new Red Panda Exhibit is coming along, but it doesn’t have an estimated opening date just yet. There’s also a new troop of spider monkeys at the zoo. One of the monkeys, Sprite, is now reunited with her mama, long-time zoo resident Candy.