It was a pretty quiet day in the den. Lily mostly had her back to the camera. Then, about 2 PM, she changed position to eat snow. Hope grabbed a cub to play with, and we grabbed some video footage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eqoYsi5G8M.
Is Hope special in the way she plays with the cubs? Does she have motherly instincts already? We wish we had more to compare with. We wish we could definitively determine if she licks the cubs’ bottoms to stimulate defecation and if she cleans them up like Lily does afterward.
As far as play goes, we remember how Ted and Honey responded to little cub Lucky when we put him in the 2-acre Bear Center enclosure with them. Honey showed no motherly instincts. She repeatedly chased him up trees. Ted wanted to be friends, but Lucky was too afraid of Ted—one of the largest black bears in the world. It took until October before Lucky dared to touch noses and get a lick from big Ted. From there, it wasn’t many days before the two were playing raucously, trustingly, and gently—little Lucky and huge Ted—as is in the ‘Making Friends’ video on bear.org and the DVD in the bear.org webstore. So in that case, the male was the one who wanted to buddy up. The play part may be more a question of personality than gender, but we wish we had more situations like Hope with cubs to know for sure.
One of the things to emerge from long-term, close-up studies like this one (and those of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and others) is the difference of individual personalities. That’s why we use the word “who” instead of “it” or “that” when talking about individual bears. They have lives. They don’t behave mechanically. They show us that the natural world is complicated, wonderful, and endlessly new. That’s what has kept us intrigued for so many decades and what continues to show us how little we know about what is going on in their minds and hearts. But to you, this is just stating the obvious.
Dolores Lindvall said we shouldn’t worry about getting the two Jasons mixed up. She said that if Jason the human heads out to the shed, Lily fans will know which Jason we are talking about. If Jason is screeching his little head off, Lily fans again will know which one it is. Others said to call Jason the human “Uncle Jason.”
Team Bear has come up with another auction item for their NABC fundraiser February 27 through March 6. Virginia McKenna, who was Joy Adamson in Born Free, sent an autographed copy of her book “The Life in My Years” to go with the Born Free DVD and the email she sent to Team Bear.
We haven’t heard anything about protection from the DNR. It worries us that the durability and visibility of ribbons on radio-collars were issues, and they may be making a decision without ever seeing them. With the importance of these few radio-collared bears in so many ways, it is a puzzle why responsible wildlife managers would not have made it illegal to shoot them years ago. Why is this so difficult? What can we do? More on this tomorrow.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center