"Milk" puts small zoo in northern Japan on the map

TOKYO -- Question: When is a polar bear a ham? Answer: When it's the young ursine named "Milk."

A recent arrival at the Kushiro Zoo, Milk has stolen the spotlight with her circus-ready antics and bear-sized curiosity; traits which have endeared her to visitors in person and online, far from the small zoo in northern Japan.

The two-year-old bear is kept well-supplied with an assortment of brightly colored playthings, from plastic tubes and balls to bucket lids and fishing buoys, which she balances on her nose, sends bouncing off walls, buries in snow banks, and flips into the air.

She has a particular fondness for orange traffic cones, but these have to be rationed as they're destroyed after just one day of bear-handling.

One of her favorite pastimes is to place a toy on the edge of her swimming pool, back up for a running start, and then barrel into the object at full speed, catapulting whatever it might be, along with her 440-pound bulk, into the water in a cannonball of fur.

The portrait of joyful abandon, she sprawls luxuriously on the steps of the pool with a lemon-shaped buoy on her stomach. She flings her snout into a long tube or, in midwinter, shimmies across the ice like a life-sized cartoon creature.

"She likes anything new," said Kimiya Koga, the zoo's outreach coordinator. Milk's gregarious personality was evident shortly after her birth in December, 2012 at an aquarium in Akita Prefecture, where she quickly displayed an unusual preference for walking on two feet.

Since then, she's gained more than 90,000 fans online, through videos showing her indulging in her play sessions.

Polar bears are renowned for their curious and playful nature, said Koga, explaining that "because they dwell in an extreme climate, polar bears have to be inventive."

In the wild, polar bears will frequently draw themselves up to their full height in order to survey the landscape by sight and scent. But it's highly unusual, he said, for polar bears to stay on their hind feet for 10 or 15 steps, as the five-foot-nine-inch Milk does.

Milk comes from playful stock. Her mother, Walnut, was also fun-loving, and is assumed to have passed on this trait, either by nature or nurture. But Milk's passion for play is off the charts, astonishing her handlers.

"I never expected anything like this," Koga said.

The small, provincial Kushiro zoo is cramped and old-fashioned by modern zoo standards, but the archaic, flat enclosures are also conducive to bipedal mobility -- another reason Milk spends so much time on two feet.

To the delight of the zoo's youngest patrons, the cream-colored bear seems to be at her most hammy, crowd-pleasing and energetic when young, screaming kids are in attendance, as when high-pitched nursery school groups come to visit.

"When kids yell, Milk likes to check them out," Koga said. "She tends to be less active when they aren't around."