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A new luxury residence has opened at the heart of the Philadelphia Zoo.
The lavish home — which has housed residents for years — recently underwent an impressive $25 million renovation expanding the spot by 60%. A brand-new wing includes outdoor space with resort-style amenities such as hammocks, natural light, cozy dens, climbing trees, water-features and a swimming pool.
The residents? Three very lucky — and very fluffy — bears.
The Philly Zoo is the nation’s first at 167 years old, so its habitats are ever-evolving. Carey Bear Country, which opened last month, is the biggest major construction project at the zoo in over a decade. The habitat also features a new Zoo360 Trail with sky tunnels where bears walk overhead of guests, which was officially unveiled to the public this week.
“This took — from planning to completion — about four and a half years,” said Maggie Morse, senior director of animal care. “Five, if you want to incorporate the data that we really collected to figure out which habitat we needed to enhance first, because we’re not done.”
Morse said that the bear habitat was chosen because of how “intelligent and curious” the bears are.
“We realized that our 1980s exhibit was good, but it could be much better.”
The Zoo’s three bears
Carey Bear Country currently houses two Andean bears (Turbo and Alba) and one sloth bear (Bhalu). Guests can now see all three in their new and improved home, which is freshly landscaped and includes an additional third habitat.
“Bears are naturally explorers,” Morse said. “We have a trail that goes into this third habitat that has pools. It’s going to have a wobble tree. It has climbing structures, and my favorite thing about the habitat is that it has face-to-face viewing with guests — protected contact of course — so that they can see the bears in caves and through the glass and feel like they’re in the environment with them.”
The zoo-staff has been using training ports and food rewards to acclimate the bears to use the new space and Zoo360 Trail.
The two male bears, Turbo and Bhalu, have adapted quickly to the trails and already started using them. Turbo was the first and is known for his bold and explorative personality. Alba is still taking her time.
“Turbo has the lucky cards that he was born under human care, so he doesn’t know natural threats very well. He just loves the world,” Morse said. “And we are really glad that we made such a confident bear. In the wild, that would probably not do him so well. Now Alba, she’s like, ‘I gotta make sure that the environment is safe, and I need to make sure that I am safe.’”
Bears doing bear things
During our visit, we got to see Bhalu enjoy his improved habitat. The little bear, who has a big fluffy head and sloth-like claws for digging up insects, had all the bare necessities. So much so, we wondered if he had undergone media training.
Bhalu immediately came out to the exhibit space and utilized many of its features. He went on his back and began playing with a ball filled with food. He climbed a tree structure, felt stuck up top and then adorably figured out how to make his way back down. He dug in his new digging pit. He made a bunch of loud and silly “snarfing” sounds, which Morse joked was the technical term for his noises. He also confidently used the new trail system overhead.
“He’s a great bear,” Morse said proudly, as she looked on.
During the visit, different zoo staff came by and joked with each other — taking pleasure in the bears doing bear things. One person noted that she had never seen Bhalu climb so high. Perhaps, watching them explore and play doesn’t get old.
We also got to see Alba, who has a lovely spectacled fur-pattern on her eyes, like all Andean bears. She appeared very demure in her movements.
“She is just so particular, and she likes everything her own way,” Morse said. “It’s her way or the highway. She loves to build nests up high. She loves to take naps in her behind-the-scenes holding, and she’s just more [about] the world on her terms.”
Setting a standard for bear care
Morse hopes that the public understands just how much work went into building the new habitat.
“We went over welfare data to see where we needed to improve for bears,” she said. “We looked at ACA, which is the Association of Zoos and Aquariums guidelines for bears, and we were like, we don’t want to just do the minimum, we want to go beyond, and so we really set a standard for bear care.”
The team relied on engineers and contractors who came, worked with the zoo’s development team and brought this vision to life. The mission is to improve empathy not just for bears, but all wildlife.
“All of these bears have what we call an SSP, or a species survival plan, and it’s because they are threatened in the wild,” Morse said. “There’s human encroachment, habitat loss, all sorts of things that make it really important for our guests and our community to understand the plight that bears face out in the wild.”
Recently, the zoo’s team sent two of their animal care specialists to India to engage in sloth bear rehabilitation and reintroduce them into the wild.
“Without SSPs and without ACA zoos, these bears are very likely going to go endangered. So we are here to share their mission to help their genetics stabilize in human care, and to tell people how to coexist with wildlife, so that we can keep bears here for a really long time.”
