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A white-haired black bear is a rarity, but as the photographs displayed below attest, an infant bear of that uncommon variety is what people started spotting near the Chemawawin Cree Nation in Manitoba (about 250 miles northwest of Winnipeg) around May 2004: Visitors to the area began reporting to conservation officials that they had seen the snow-white cub roaming the First Nations community with its mother amidst a pack of black bears, sending tourists flocking to Oscar's Point at the northern tip of Lake Winnipegosis to catch a glimpse of the unusual little bruin. Unfortunately, the cub's celebrity ultimately helped bring about a tragedy that befalls many bears. Visitors began feeding the mother and her cub, acclimatizing the bears to humans and their food, and on 11 July 2004 the mother was struck and killed by a vehicle as the pair of bruins was being fed by highway motorists. The female cub, unlikely to survive on its own, was subsequently taken to a new home at the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg. Its light-colored fur had already begun to darken by then, leading wildlife officials to speculate that perhaps the cub (as sometimes happens with black bears) was born with a temporarily white coat that would gradually turn black as the animal matured. In August 2006, reader Joe Kenny kindly passed along to us a photo he snapped at the Assiniboine Park Zoo, showing that the cub — since dubbed Maskwa, the cree word for bear — still has a mostly white coat of fur as she grew into adulthood: Maskwa lives in an enclosure with another black bear, a placard outside explaining her coloring and origins to visitors: The Assiniboine Park Zoo is also home to a similar rarity, a white male buffalo named Blizzard, born in March 2006 and donated to the zoo by a rancher.
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