Nora, the young polar bear who stole the hearts of visitors to the Oregon Zoo, will be returning to Portland in March, zoo officials said Wednesday.
Nora will be moved from her current home at Utah’s Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City to the Oregon Zoo’s brand new bear exhibit, called Polar Passage.
“We’re so excited to welcome Nora back,” Amy Cutting, who oversees the zoo’s marine life area, said in a statement. “She’s kind of like the kid who goes off to college and comes home all grown up. We can’t wait to get reacquainted and introduce her to the new Polar Passage habitat.”
Nora, now 5, first came to the Pacific Northwest in 2016 as a 10-month-old cub after she was abandoned by her mother soon after her birth in Columbus, Ohio. She was hand raised by a team of zookeepers there and brought to Portland in search of a companion, an older bear named Tasul who had lived at the Oregon Zoo for nearly three decades.
The two bears never formed the bond zookeepers had hoped for, and Tasul died within a few months of Nora’s arrival. Keepers at the zoo also discovered she had failed to absorb some vital nutrients in her infancy and she had developed skeletal issues.
Nora was prescribed antidepressants after keepers saw troubling signs of mental health issues in the young bear. The Oregonian/OregonLive chronicled Nora’s troubles and triumphs, along with the threats that climate change pose to her species and the native people in her ancestral homeland of Alaska, in a five-part series in 2017 and a 30-minute documentary.
Keepers felt Nora needed a companion of her own species since she had been raised by people and had little exposure to other bears. In the fall of 2017, they decided to move her to Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City to be paired with another bear named Hope.
Meanwhile, the Oregon Zoo had delayed construction of Polar Passage and, soon after Nora left, the old exhibit was torn down.
It took a while, but Nora’s relationship with Hope eventually blossomed, the two bears play-fighting and wrestling to the delight of her new fans in Salt Lake City.
“At Hogle, Nora learned how to interact with another bear,” Cutting said in a statement. “This was so important for her development.”
Things were going well for Nora until, in 2019, when her keepers in Utah discovered she had broken her humerus, a large, weight-bearing bone in one of her front limbs.
A team of veterinary surgeons traveled from Texas and in a first-of-its-kind procedure, inserted a metal rod into the broken bone. Nora endured months of isolation and physical therapy as she healed, but eventually made a full recovery.
Earlier this week, Hogle Zoo announced that Hope would be moving to another zoo to be paired with a male in the hopes the two will mate. That meant Nora would need a new home and, with the completion of the new polar bear exhibit at the Oregon Zoo, Portland was the logical choice.
The zoo didn’t say exactly when Nora would return, only that it would be sometime in March. She’ll be alone for the first few months of her second stay, but the zoo anticipates she’ll be joined by another female bear sometime in the fall.
