Grizzly Bears OKC Zoo

This video was taken on our most recent outing to visit the newly opened Oklahoma Trails at the Oklahoma City Zoo. Our zoo is one of the best in the country and we are proud to be Zoo Friends and go visit every chance we get. The weather was beautiful, and the highlight was seeing our grizzly bears, Will (named for Will Rogers) and Wiley (named for Wiley Post) enjoy their new area. The two were rescued as cubs in Alaska and have been raised at the zoo. The red water is because A) We live in Oklahoma, and B) We had record rainfalls the few days prior causing quite the stiru up of red soil, which 3) Equals red water. The following is an excerpt from a news release about the Oklahoma Trails and the grizzly bears. "Creating a cause" The real reason the exhibit was built, Aucone said, was to create a larger home for the zoo's two grizzly bears. The 4-year-old brown-colored bears, named Will and Wiley after Will Rogers and Wiley Post, are a crowd favorite. A hunter rescued the two bears from Alaska after he shot their mother, not knowing that she had cubs, Aucone said. Holden Stephens, 7, sat cross-legged, clutching the metal fence that kept the playful bears away from him. He said he wished the bears would climb a tree — but what they were up to was fine by him. One walked up to the moat at the front of the exhibit, stuck his nose in the air and twitched it. "See look," he said. "And I like him smelling." Aucone said the bears were swimming in the moat earlier in the day. They also spend a lot of their time digging in the red dirt of their hill-side home. Dead trees are strapped to the ground for them to climb on. If they weren't fastened down, Aucone said, the bears would pick the hefty trees up and toss them into the water.

YouTube | April 6, 2007