In early February, Colorado Parks and Wildlife transported two young black bear cubs from a rehabilitation facility to an artificial den on Pikes Peak.

The bears had been fitted with GPS ear tags that were funded by the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo’s annual Member Conservation Vote. Cheyenne Mountain Zoo members are funding a study on the movements of black bears in the Pikes Peak region and voted in 2022 to spend conservation-allocated membership revenue on GPS ear tags used when reintroducing black bears to the wild.

About every two weeks, GPS data is uploaded from the ear transmitter tags. CPW uses the snapshots of the bears’ locations to help define successful rehabilitation and care for orphaned bear cubs, and to determine where they should be released.

According to CPW, one of the cubs was orphaned last summer in the Broadmoor neighborhood in southwest Colorado Springs. The other made its way into the Rifle Falls Fish Hatchery. The two cubs became surrogate siblings at the rehabilitation facility.

This is the second time member-funded GPS trackers have been used to track black bear movements after wild reintroduction. Two other cubs with ear tag transmitters were released to the same artificial den in January 2022.

According to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, the Member Conservation Vote has provided $600,000 of membership revenue to support field conservation worldwide.