Hope The Bear Missing, Feared Shot By Hunter

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- A popular Minnesota Bear being tracked by the Wildlife Research Institute in Ely is missing.

The institute wrote about it in a blog post on its web site, called "Losing Hope." Hope is a cub of "Lily the Bear," who was popularly featured on a live web cam and had thousands of followers.

They are still working with the Minnesota DNR, but fear Hope may have been shot by a hunter. A bait site had been spotted earlier in the week before Hope went missing.

It is not illegal to kill radio-collared bears, but the Institute asks hunters not to do so because of the information they can gather from these bears.

Hope was actually not a collared bear as each time researchers put one on her, she found a way to take it off. But she is one of their research bears, and without the collar it makes it tough for hunters to identify research bears.