It’s winter!
November 21, 2010 – 3:19 PM CST
No matter what the calendar says, winter has come to Ely, Minnesota—and it’s covering Lily’s home territory. Big flakes are falling from the calm, grey overcast sky. Deer have replaced bears at the feeders in the area, and chickadees are hungry. One after another come to pluck sunflower seeds from anyone’s hands—22 chickadees and 1 red-breasted nuthatch in 5 minutes. Nearby, a doe licks the falling snow from the head and back of her fawn. Tranquil. Quiet—except for the sweet sounds of chickadees, the calls of ravens, and the occasional distant gunshot on this last day of deer season. We hope the snow doesn’t make it hard to make a last check on bear dens in the next couple weeks.
We love this area with its diverse wildlife. What makes it so diverse is that the forest here is a combination of the conifer forests to the north and the deciduous forests to the south, and the wildlife of those forests overlaps here. Our Superior National Forest has more breeding bird species (155) than any other national forest. Wildlife seen on the WRI’s 60 acres includes 132 birds and 29 mammals, including black bears, wolves, coyotes, moose, white-tailed deer, fisher, and pine marten. Forty-four other birds that are fairly common nearby haven’t been spotted on the property yet. We’re always vigilant for new species. Picture shows Gray Jay puffed up to keep warm.
No fresh bear news again, of course, so here’s another passage from Chapter 1 about Lynn becoming comfortable around bears decades ago.
I accidentally had another such experience on a windy March 14th, 1986, when I homed in on radio signals from the den of a 21-year-old mother and cubs. Her “den” turned out to be a bed of leaves on the ground surface. She was curled up in a ball with her head tucked under her chest, breathing on her 2-month-old cubs. In the snow, all that was visible was her furry back. To record this unusual scene, I attached a super wide angle 20mm lens to my camera. Through the viewfinder, she looked far away, and I edged closer than I meant to. Three feet away, I clicked, and the viewfinder went black. I hadn’t heard her lunge in the wind. I wondered what was wrong with the camera. Then I noticed her face inches from mine and jerked back.
I’d learned something. I had wondered what would happen if I didn’t jerk away when bears lunged that close. For this bear, the answer was “Nothing.” She probably wondered why her bluff hadn’t worked. This wasn’t a bear that trusted me, although I had visited her dens 12 times over the years. Nevertheless, she settled back on her cubs and stayed put as I attached a hypodermic syringe to a stick and gently tranquilized her. The picture turned out to be a blurry head with flattened ears coming at the camera.
While we are working here on words and videos, you are doing big things. We saw how Olatz’s beautiful book ‘Lily & Hope – the light of the Northwoods’ was bought for $2,500—plus matching money from angels. Thank you so much for this help and so much more. It’s hard to believe how much closer you have brought us to being debt free and fulfilling our mission this past year.
Thank you for all you do!
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center