Anxiety rules our lives. By late morning, we were seeing so little activity from Lily’s GPS that we wondered if she had rubbed the radio-collar off on a tree. That’s the usual way bears lose their radio-collars. We often find them at the bases of utility poles, a favorite place for standing up and rubbing their back, shoulders, back of neck, and crown. We zipped out to home in on Lily’s telemetry signal.
We stumbled onto their empty bed on the way in. The ground litter of the surrounding area was all dug up as is typical of feeding on snowfleas. They gather into either mating or dispersal swarms (not sure which) in the spring which makes these tiny bugs worth going after. We looked up the bed tree for Faith—nope. We found Lily (still collared, phew!) and Hope but no Faith. Lily ignored us and kept walking. “There’s something weird going on here. I have a bad feeling about Faith. Where is she?” Sue asked in an anxious voice. We followed Lily to see if she was grunting as if looking for Faith. We didn’t hear anything, but she paused at the base of a big red pine with a split top. Lynn looked up and saw Faith sleeping in the split. “I see Faith,” he said.
“Where?”
“Not telling,” said Lynn, but it wasn’t funny.
“Don’t do that. Where is she?” Sue said urgently.
Lynn didn’t dare joke around. He pointed.
Eventually, Faith moved. “Well, she’s alive,” said Sue with relief. Crisis over. We assumed Faith was sleeping in the tree because it was a windy day when everything sounds like approaching danger.
But we couldn’t understand Lily. She continued to ignore us. She checked the air and sounds off to the west and then came back and lay down about 10 feet from the base of Faith’s tree. She was oddly lethargic. Had she eaten something bad? Hope was energetic as usual. With Hope, an unusual thing was that she let Lynn touch around her neck a lot, making us more optimistic about getting a radio-collar on her.
We picked up scats, including a fresh one we saw Hope deposit.
Back at the Research Center, Hope’s fresh scat weighed 81 grams for anyone interested in the relationship between bear size and scat size.
Sue did her usual expert job of identifying scat contents. Hope’s scat smelled sweet and spicy like snow fleas, and that was a major ingredient.
Another major ingredient was parts of male Hazel catkins. We’d noticed how loaded the hazel bushes were on our way in and wondered if there was any relationship between the catkins and the number of nuts. We haven’t had a really good hazelnut crop since 2001, and we’d love to see the bears have a good year with abundant hazelnuts. A good hazelnut crop is very important to black bears here. It keeps them out of trouble. It makes them grow and reproduce. Many females across the Northland produce their first cubs the winter following a good hazelnut crop.
Another scat ingredient, crayfish, might help explain why the bears have been close to the shoreline quite a bit lately. In all the decades we have been analyzing scats, the only crayfish feeding was in this family—June, Lily, and Hope. And Hope might have discovered it on her own. A scat from Hope last year, collected less than a hundred yards from where we picked her scat up today, contained crayfish parts. That was while she was on her own in early June. Video of today's visit with Lily and family is posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hk5MxeyRHw.
Meanwhile, Jo is still close to where she was yesterday and still within the 230-yard diameter she has used the last 12 days.
Jason took a rough bearing on Juliet’s signal that appears to be about a mile and a half from her den. She has yearlings with her.
Lily has been up to a mile and a quarter from her den and is moving more like a mother with yearlings than a mother with a cub.
A Lily fan asked about the scrape on Jo’s back. We saw her get that last fall when she tried a rock den with an entrance a little too small. She got in okay but had a hard time getting out and scraped the hair off that spot. We imagined she’d tried the den earlier in the year when she was skinnier. Mostly it was the guard hairs that were scraped off. Jo still has short dense underfur in that spot. She ended up digging a burrow den instead.
Another Lily fan asked about the light spots on the back of Faith’s ears. Those spots are common in cubs but she will likely lose them with her mid-summer molt.
Jason Sawyer tried to retrieve Donna’s slipped collar from the island where she denned in a big swamp. The water was too deep to get there wearing chest waders at this time of year. Donna was due to have cubs, so we wondered how she got them to shore. Mothers do carry cubs across water on their backs occasionally. We also wondered if she actually had cubs. She was supposed to have them last winter, too, and didn’t. We wonder what’s going on with her. We wish she hadn’t removed her collar. It means we can’t find her and know about her cubs until someone spots her and we can give her a new one.
Another Lily fan sent this link to an April 14 broadcast on Duluth Channel 6 about Jason. http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://www.northlandsnewscenter.com/news/video/Jason-the-Bear-Dies-119769524.html&ct=ga&cad=CAcQARgBIAAoATAAOABAl4nd7QRIAVAAWABiBWVuLVVT&cd=yW3ZcxkyaE4&usg=AFQjCNE-Xtt3sgWX3YRRSdboARI-cDKgLg
We’re ready to start the Pond Cam with Ted, Honey, and Lucky on bear.org as soon as the technicians in charge can get there and do the switch. It should be done this week.
You have us hanging in there steady in 6th place in the Readers Digest contest to win money for Ely. The link to vote 10 times in a row each day through May 16 is http://wehearyouamerica.readersdigest.com/town.jsp?town=ELY&state=MN .
You have the Wolf Center in a strong 3rd place in the Chase contest where we can vote only once through May 4. To vote, go to this link http://www.facebook.com/ChaseCommunityGiving and click “Like.” Then go to this link http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/411543539-international and register your vote for the International Wolf Center.
Dana Coleman’s first grade class initiated a petition to have the American black bear named Minnesota’s state mammal. This is an amazing opportunity for students across Minnesota to learn about their state government. The link to the class’s petition is http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/BlackBear-MNState-Mammal/.
We’re keeping our eyes open for new contests where we can vote money to the areas where the research bears actually live.
Thank you for all you are doing.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center