Image Credit: The Siberian Times/ Facebook
This polar bear cub should be enjoying life with its mother along the icy and frigid shores of the Arctic Ocean. But instead, she ended up 435 miles south of home near a river in Siberia, Russia.
Experts are completely baffled.
The female cub is estimated to be only 9 months old. According to The Siberian Times, she was spotted taking up residence near a fishing plant on the Kolyma River where locals fed her fish scraps.
Ivan Belonogov, head of the Central Kolyma Inspectorate for Nature Protection, told The Siberian Times: “The cub is not afraid of people, since the fishermen who found the bear fed her with fish. For now the condition of the cub is satisfactory, her appetite is good.”
But how the cub got so far south still remains a mystery. That’s a REALLY long way for such a young animal to travel all alone. The Siberian Times suggested that maybe its mother was likely killed by poachers, who then took the cub with them south from the Arctic coast and released it when it got too big.
Either way, we’re definitely rooting for this adventurous and brave polar bear cub and hope one day she can be strong enough to survive on her own in the wild!