Nora, the polar bear cub who took up residence at the Oregon Zoo last September, will be saying farewell to Portland this fall as officials get ready to break ground on a new exhibit for the arctic carnivores.

Nora, who was hand-raised after her mother abandoned her, will be paired with Hope, a polar bear cub born at the Toledo Zoo in December 2015. The two will take up residence at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, Utah, sometime this fall.

Nora's departure, after such a brief stint in Portland, will be bittersweet, said curator Amy Cutting, who oversees the zoo's marine life area.

"As hard as it is for us to say goodbye, this is the right thing for Nora and we are really excited for her," Cutting said in a statement. "For a young bear that was hand-raised, the companionship of another bear will be so important for developing social skills.

"Nora has made a lot of progress and this is an important next step in her life."

Life has been rough for Nora up to this point. Abandoned by her mother in the den just six days after she was born at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio, the young cub was pulled from the exhibit and raised by a team of doting zoo staff.

She was moved to the Oregon Zoo before she was a year old with hopes that she would be mentored by the zoo's elder bear Tasul. Things did not go according to plan, as Tasul and Nora didn't immediately take to each other. Nora, having only been around humans for the majority of her short life, was tense and apprehensive around the older and much larger bear. Tasul never acted aggressively toward the younger bear, but Nora was unable to relax as keepers had hoped.

Despite their less-than-friendly sessions together, keepers at the Oregon Zoo held out hope that Tasul could act as a mentor to Nora. That was not to be. Tasul was diagnosed with an aggressive form of ovarian cancer and euthanized in November.

That left Nora, who for most of her young life has only interacted with humans, as the sole polar bear wandering the entirety of the zoo's three polar bear viewing areas.

In the wild, polar bear cubs are virtually inseparable from their mothers until the age of 2, a period when they learn valuable life lessons. Keepers at the zoo did their best to replicate those lessons, facilitating what they called "zen sessions," which were meant to teach Nora how to relax and what sort of triggers were worth getting worked up over.

Still, nothing could replace the company of another bear and keepers kept that as their goal throughout Nora's time in Portland. Given that Hope and Nora were only born a few weeks apart, it became clear early on that the two would make a good pair.

"From the time she was a week old, Nora has interacted almost exclusively with people," Cutting said. "Hope should be a great companion for her. The two bears were born less than a month apart, and have a similar youthful energy."

The zoo in Toledo didn't have room for the two young bears and, with construction on the Oregon Zoo's new polar bear exhibit space looming, it became a matter of figuring out who had room for the pair.

In April, zookeepers at Hogle Zoo announced that their longtime resident polar bear, a 19-year-old male named Rizzo, had died. That left a prime exhibit, not to mention an expert team of bear caregivers, with no bears for which to give care.

It did, however, create a perfect opportunity for Nora to get the much-needed company she's been without for most of her life. Keepers from Portland and Toledo will be traveling to Salt Lake City in the coming months to start the transition process.

"The polar bear community is tight-knit. We all work together on easing transitions when bears move and we share best practices for polar bear care," Cutting said.

There is a small chance Nora could return to Portland once construction of the new exhibit is completed in 2020. That will ultimately be up to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the body that accredits zoos and makes recommendations on animal placement.

In the meantime, zoo-goers will have the rest of the summer to see Nora. Officials from the zoo didn't say exactly when she would be leaving, only that it would likely be some time in the fall.

-- Kale Williams

kwilliams@oregonian.com

503-294-4048