The den is flooded inside and out. A scan around the area today showed lots of water as snow melted, hastened by rain and hail. Lily is probably still high and dry by the big white pine. We’re anxious to get out there and give Lily a collar with a GPS unit that sends a precise location to Google Earth every 10 minutes.
The picture of Jason by the tree makes his head look huge and his body skinny. It’s just the angle. He looks more normal in the picture of Lily nursing Hope while Jason climbs up on her to get in on the nursing. Out of the picture, Faith is hurrying to Lily from the right. Both were taken on the April 8 visit.
A Lily fan asked if the Donna bear in the 1980 Wild Kingdom program is the same Donna alive today. No. In the 1980 program, Lynn wanted to get his wife and kids’ names into the program somehow, so he named the 6-year-old mother bear Donna and her two cubs Kelly and Colleen for the program. The cubs survived for at least a year through a bad food year but may have starved the next year because they left the den as yearlings weighing only 17 and 21 pounds and were too small to radio-collar. Their eartags were never turned in, so it’s likely they didn’t make it. With the scarce food, Donna didn’t get big enough to produce another litter until 1984, and the 2 cubs in that litter also survived. They got a great start, weighing 5 pounds (the female) and 6.25 pounds (the male) on March 25, 1984 and 50 and 57 pounds as yearlings on March 26, 1985. Donna again went 4 years between litters and produced a single female cub that weighed 9.125 pounds on March 15, 1988—the largest cub we ever weighed at a den. She weighed 67 pounds on March 29, 1989, and was off to a great start. Donna again went 4 years between litters and produced 2 female cubs that weighed 6.7 pounds and 8 pounds on March 29, 1992. Donna’s radio signal disappeared during hunting season that fall when she was 18, which meant we couldn’t check the survival of her big cubs in spring 1993.
Lynn waited until 2000 to name another bear after his wife. That spring, Blackheart had two female cubs—the cubs in “The Man Who Walks With Bears.” One had a dot on its chest and had to be called Dot. The other had to be called Donna. When Donna produced her first litter in 2003, there was a male and female. They had to be named Kelly and Colleen even if Kelly had to be the male’s name. Blackheart was killed by a hunter in 2005—one of the 6 radio-collared bears killed in the last 6 years. Kelly was shot as a yearling. Dot and Donna are still alive as 11-year-olds, and Colleen is still alive as an 8-year-old. All are radio-collared and should have cubs this year. Checking them and the other radio-collared bears is one of the things we want to do as soon as possible. Glenn made it to Dot’s den on Saturday but didn’t hear any cubs. He got home exhausted after wading through snow up to his waist on the north-facing slope where Dot was still in her den 0.6 miles from the road. Glenn is several years older than Lynn and puts him to shame.
A big thank you to Team Bear and all who participated in the “New Beginnings” fundraiser. You brought the debt down over $6,000 to $74,674, putting us that much closer to moving forward on new projects.
In the Readers Digest contest to win money for Ely, we stretched the lead over 7th place another 3,000 votes to 152,000, nearly doubling the 170,000 votes of the 7th place city. The link to vote 10 times in a row each day is http://wehearyouamerica.readersdigest.com/town.jsp?town=ELY&state=MN.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center