I recently saw a post online that said “my toxic trait is thinking that any wild animal I come across wants to be my friend.”
Logically, I know this is not true, but I love the zoo because it allows me to live out this fantasy where every animal loves me as much as I love him or her.
There are lots of animals I would like to meet at the zoo, but I am particularly attached to Nora the polar bear.
Nora was born at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium during my freshman year at Ohio State, so I was especially in awe that a sweet baby animal was in such close proximity to my new home.
Normally, I love keeping up with the babies at the zoo, but I tend to lose track of them once they aren’t so small and news coverage starts to die down.
Nora always stuck with me because she has had such a captivating life.
She is a little bit of a celebrity among zoo animals, and is even the subject of a book called “The Loneliest Polar Bear” by Kale Williams, a reporter in Oregon.
If you don’t know much about her, celebrations for Nora’s birth were cut short in Columbus when she was abandoned by her mother only six days after she was born.
After zookeepers and veterinarians decided to hand-feed her, I followed her story religiously and genuinely worried about whether baby Nora would make it.
To show you how invested I was in her story – I actually walked around the floor of my dorm with my laptop and asked friends to vote in a poll that would decide Nora’s name.
(The options were Desna, an Inuit name meaning “boss;” Kaya, a native American name meaning “little but wise;” Nora, which merges Nanuq and Aurora, her parents’ names; and Sakari, an Inuit name meaning “sweet.” I personally liked Kaya best, but I digress.)
I was so relieved when it became clear that Nora would survive and I could not wait to go visit her in person at the zoo.
Before she was a year old, though, she was moved to the Oregon Zoo, then to the Hogle Zoo in Utah.
The fact that my dream of meeting Nora was left unfulfilled drove me to follow her story for a time, which was kept up by the fact that she’s faced and overcome a number of obstacles since then.
Nora had metabolic bone disease as a cub, which zookeepers have said will likely result in her developing arthritis early on.
To make matters even crazier, Nora later broke the humerus bone on her front, right leg, which keepers at the Hogle Zoo said resulted from her playful personality and being “a very rambunctious bear.”
Nora’s caretakers weren’t equipped to repair the fracture, but were able to get in touch with a horse surgeon who pioneered the procedure of fixing large animals’ bones using a procedure similar to the way metal rods and screws are used to set fractures in humans.
While Jeff Watkins had never operated on a polar bear, he and a team of veterinarians successfully completed the surgery on the 500-pound Nora.
Officials at the Oregon Zoo said, between her bone disease and injury, Nora has permanent skeletal damage that will leave her with a different gait.
Even though she will need special care throughout her lifetime, it is amazing to me that little Nora persevered and survived so much. Aside from how cute she is, maybe that’s why I love her so much.
We got to talking about Nora recently and my coworkers saw that she has since been moved back to the Oregon Zoo, which has an entirely new “Polar Passage” that was designed partly with Nora in mind.
It made me so happy to see that Nora now lives with her half-sister, Amelia Gray, and zookeepers say they get along very well and play together.
After a long journey, perhaps she is not the loneliest polar bear in the world anymore.
Of course, she will be even less lonely if I ever make it out to Oregon to meet her.
-Kayleen Petrovia is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune