Still learning
October 17, 2010 – 8:14 PM CDT
As the bear hunting season winds to a close this evening, Lily and Hope still have us baffled. So does Bravheart.
Lily and Hope showed such a tight cluster of GPS locations that we wondered if they were at a den. We went to see but made the mistake of not saying “It’s me, bear” loud enough or often enough. Lily and Hope melted away into dense cover. We never got close enough to hear a twig or catch a glimpse. When we realized they were moving and that the habitat was too wet for a den, we left asking again, “When will they ever den up?”
Pregnant females usually are the first to enter dens. If Lily has cubs this winter, she will prove to be an exception to that rule.
Braveheart is another exception. She is typically among the last of the radio-collared females to den up whether she is pregnant or not. Two days ago, we thought she had denned. She arrived at the den we described as a castle. It was a fortress against any animal that might disturb her. She raked bedding into it. We thought she was there for the winter. The only thing we wondered about is how she backed her bulk 10-12 feet into the narrow den while raking bedding. Did she find it too confining like the den Jo abandoned? Today, she apparently decided against denning there. What our human minds judged to be a terrific den apparently didn’t measure up in her bear mind. About 10:30 AM, she left. She walked within 200 yards of the den she has visited periodically this past month and moved in a 6-mile arc that ended back where Sue walked through rough terrain to visit her a couple weeks ago. Her GPS batteries should last another week. We can only wait and see what she does. We have a lot to learn about the variability in bear behavior.
GPS technology is showing us so much more than we used to get from telemetry alone. In the old days, we’d be lucky to get one telemetry location every couple days, and we’d have no idea what the bears were doing in those locations. Now, seeing GPS locations on our computer every ten minutes and being able to go out and observe trusting bears that usually will ignore us is showing us so much more. Our GPS units that send locations in real time, rather than the usual GPS collars that store information throughout the year so biologists can download it at winter dens, opens the door to so much more learning opportunity.
This fall, bears are showing us that it is common for bears to size up and reject dens before selecting one for the winter. Some of these may be dens that fit them just fine earlier in the summer before they fattened for the winter. Seeing the details now available to us, we wonder how many of our old telemetry locations were from bears similarly sizing up dens.
Now that the summer is over, we thought it time to name RC’s 3 male cubs. We named them Doug, Bill, and Jim after members of the Den Cam team.
The first cub is named after Doug Hajicek of White Wolf Entertainment. Doug is the TV producer who put together last year’s team that brought Lily and Hope to the internet. You saw him on NBC Today twice in January and may know him as the producer of “The Man Who Walks With Bears” and of the Monster Quest series. He will be working his magic again this winter.
The second cub is named after Bill Rice of Ritron, Inc., and Bill Powers of PixController, Inc. Bill Rice is a master radio engineer who knows how to put things together and make them work. Bill Powers designed the Den Cam setup that brought Lily and Hope to the internet.
The third cub is named after Jim Stroner, a managing engineer at Digi International who, with Bill Rice, is finding ways to transmit den cam signals where there are no telephone lines or power lines.
All are volunteers.
One of the biggest criticisms we get is over our practice of naming the research bears. To some, naming them humanizes them, and some people think that is wrong. Why do we name them? Because we don’t want to give them numbered ear tags, as most research projects do. Ear-tagging them risks their lives by capturing and tranquilizing them and would destroy their trust. And names are easier to remember.
Congratulations to all who participated in the fund-raising efforts for the Wildlife Research Institute (www.bearstudy.org) during the bear hunting season. Today, you went over the $26,000 mark. Thank you!
And you voted Ely a bigger lead today in the contest to bring $20,000 to Ely’s Schools. The score is now 2,711 to 887 over the second place school. To vote, go to http://www.care2.com/schoolcontest/2704/054/.
To answer some of the questions about our methods and topics of study and whether our methods create nuisance bears and jeopardize public safety, read 2008 Research Plan and Public Safety Assessment. The research we are doing differs from all other bear research in the world. By relying on trust, we obtain information that would be impossible to obtain without observing animals that trust and ignore their observers. If a person cannot see the animals they are studying, there is not much he or she can learn about behavior and ecology. Most research projects are designed to determine population size and reproductive rate in order to regulate bear populations through hunting. We have done that in the past but are now learning how bears live, what they are like, and how people and bears can better coexist. Our goal is to share the information as fast as we learn it. To the extent possible, we want to make it possible for people to learn directly from the bears, as we do.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center