The Lions Return; the Andean Bears Arrive

Lions 2023; bears 2023–2024; the three bears together 2026

Lead: For twenty years the zoo's lions had been two brothers. Tango and Onyo arrived in 2002 as five-month-old cubs, and when Tango, aged seventeen, was euthanized in November 2019 for chronic age-related conditions, executive director Josh Sisk said it was hard to think of the zoo "without first thinking of our iconic lion brothers." Within two years the roaring stopped altogether: the zoo's own magazine, looking back, wrote that "for almost two years, the Zoo was missing something. Bird songs and monkey howls interrupted the peace, but there were no lions roaring, a previously-iconic sound in the River Park neighborhood of South Bend." The return was the second half of the zoo's "Big & Loud" campaign — $6.2 million in new species and habitats, which the parks magazine called the largest investment in the zoo's history to that date.

A new pride arrived in May 2023: Kembe, a male, and Shaba and Shtuko, sisters, all about ten years old, rescued as babies in South Africa, unable to be re-released, and together as a pride since 2013; they came on the recommendation of the Lion Species Survival Plan, with a breeding recommendation for Kembe and Shtuko. Their home, the Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Lion Habitat, was the renovated chimpanzee habitat on the zoo's east side — the lion portion of the project cost a little over $1.5 million and had been fully funded in the spring of 2022 — and it opened with a ribbon cutting on 29 June 2023, the three lions appearing in their completed outdoor habitat. The old lion exhibit, emptied, took the zoo's next arrival: Muniri, a male Andean (spectacled) bear, who debuted on 30 August 2023 on the Andean Bear Species Survival Plan's recommendation, lodged in the former lion quarters while his own habitat was built.

That habitat is joined to The Lodge, a new concessions and dining building that officially opened on 28 March 2024, and Muniri — nine years old, about 250 pounds — moved into the finished bear habitat in June 2024. Two brothers, Ian and Sean, followed him to South Bend as the zoo's newest Andean bears; through the summer of 2026 the keepers rotated and then housed all three bears together, as the zoo's own accounts record — the spectacled bears of the old lion house now sharing the new one.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune report, carried by WLKM, 10 November 2019 (Tango's euthanasia at seventeen; the brothers' arrival in 2002; Sisk's statement).
2. Potawatomi Zoo releases, "Lion Pride Arrives," 5 May 2023, and "Lion Habitat Opens," 29 June 2023 (Kembe, Shaba, and Shtuko; the Veldman habitat; the cost and funding).
3. Potawatomi Zoo, Uproar, fall 2023 (the two years without lions; the Big & Loud campaign, $6.2 million).
4. Potawatomi Zoo releases, "Andean Bear Debuts," August 2023, and "Muniri Moves In," 5 June 2024; The Lodge's opening, 28 March 2024; the zoo's 2026 accounts of the three bears housed together.