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Weather, Radio-collar, Bear Center - UPDATE November 19, 2015

Pileated woodpecker - 11/18/2015Pileated woodpecker - 11/18/2015Yesterday was record-breaking warm. The previous record for that date was 53°F in 2012. Yesterday was 57°F, 26°F above average. In the afternoon, wind gusts rose to 33 MPH, which meant tree branches were blowing wildly and loudly. A visiting young male pileated woodpecker paid attention. Before taking his turn at the suet, he sat for several minutes twisting his head constantly to watch the white pine branches in motion above him. I suspect these woodpeckers are especially alert to motion that could be a swooping hawk or eagle. Eventually, he seemed satisfied that the motion was harmless, and he turned to ingesting suet.

The El Niño warmth has given us a reprieve in snow-shoveling. If all the precipitation that fell as rain this last week had come down as snow, we’d have been getting in shape behind a shovel rather than sitting at the desk. We might get in shape yet. Today, it’s back to normal temperatures below freezing with snow.

A growing male polar bear wearing a tightening radio collar in the South Beaufort Sea near Alaska is an example of why we are so cautious about radio-collaring—especially where supplemental feeding means extra growth. That’s why we didn’t initially put radio-collars on young males that were likely to disperse beyond the area we could find them with telemetry alone. When new GPS technology let us add real-time GPS units to collars after 2008, we finally dared to radio-collar young Cal in 2009 and 2010 and safely get a whole lot of new information. We usually didn’t radio-collar large males that can gain a few hundred pounds over summer. Most had necks too large anyway. We focused on females. They have skinnier necks and they established territories in this area where, using trust, we could find them and adjust their collars as needed. The collars all had breakaway pieces of leather, but we would have been much more hesitant to collar bears if we weren’t sure we could use trust to approach these fast-growing bears in the woods and adjust their collars. That caution about trapping, tranquilizing, and collaring is part of the kinder, gentler methods we developed. Using trust, we were able to use the Jane Goodall-type of research that provided information that would have been impossible with the more traditional methods.

At the Bear Center, we repositioned some exhibits in preparation for the new camping exhibit. Thank you again for the GiveMN and Mystic Lake donations that help make this possible.

Thank you for all you do.

Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center


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