Do bears sometimes just have a day of rest? Or is there so much vegetation coming up that they don’t have to move far to fill up? It’s cooler today, only 45, and windy. Maybe the wind inhibits travel. The new GPS units are giving more data than ever before. Lily and family spent the day in an area only 157 yards in diameter. For June and her 2 cubs it was an area only 163 yards in diameter, and for Jo and her cub it was an area only 91 yards in diameter.
We re-collared Juliet today, a notch tighter and put a radio-collar on her yearling Sharon. So both female yearlings are now radio-collared in preparation for the family break-up coming up shortly. We won’t radio-collar the male yearling, A Boy Named Sue. Young males can travel too far. We made an exception and radio-collared Cal last year because he knew us well enough to let us change batteries in his GPS unit, but Boy is not that approachable. As it turned out, Cal was not all that approachable, even for us, outside the study area, and we had to follow him by airplane instead of GPS after his GPS batteries died. We would have liked to radio-track him to his den last fall but he was shot 80 miles away from the study area in early September.
We retrieved Braveheart’s radio-collar from her classic cave den today. The well-chewed collar was about 12 feet inside the den and buried under the bedding. We haven’t seen Braveheart yet and don’t know how many cubs she produced.
Today is Jo Day (pictured above). Lily fans, including the mods, pulled together the story of her life. Thank you! Jo is an unusually sweet, calm bear. That was a surprise because she is the daughter of prickly RC and the granddaughter of wary Shadow. We didn’t get to know her well until she was a yearling on her own. She was quick to learn our voices. But that doesn’t make any difference where she can’t hear us. We found her signal after an absence, and we wanted to change her radio-collar. She was along a powerline within shouting distance from the town of Soudan. We worried that she might get into trouble there. We spotted her a hundred and fifty yards ahead of us. We said, “It’s me, bear.” It was just enough for her to hear a voice. She looked up from her foraging and bolted.
Sometime later, we got her signal in a cedar swamp. It was a calm day, and Jo could hear well. We knew she was just ahead of us hidden in the tangle of brush and downed trees. “It’s me, bear,” we repeated, and she emerged and cautiously came. We replaced her radio-collar and tracked her to her den in a culvert under a lightly used woods road. She came out for a handful of nuts and was amazingly calm for as little contact as we’d had with her. We changed her radio-collar for the winter. Last year, she grew and matured. She tried several dens before making her selection. This year, tied down with her cub (pictured right), she is easier to find in the woods and is getting to know us more and more as we visit her to change the batteries in her GPS unit. We named her Jo after Joanna Usherwood, wife of Bearwalker producer Ted Oakes. Jo is a sweetheart, so we are happy to have Jo bear as her namesake. In fact, when talking about Jo the bear, it is becoming natural to call her Sweet Jo. We feel she will become a bear that ignores us as we walk with her and learn new information we can share.
In the news:
KSTP-TV Channel 5 Eyewitness News joined Dana Coleman’s first grade class on their field trip to the Minnesota Zoo. It aired this evening at 5 PM and 6:30 PM and will air again at 11 PM. It can be viewed online at http://kstp.com/news/stories/S2111472.shtml?cat=1. The focus is the students and Dana talking about making the black bear the Minnesota state mammal. It’s a great news piece!
Representative Phyllis Kahn called to say her bill mandating that the DNR send letters to all bear hunters in the study area urging them not to shoot radio-collared bears was defeated in the legislature. It was not supported by the DNR or by Representative Denny McNamara and Senator Bill Ingebritsen, chairmen of the Natural Resources committees. Without their support, the bill had little chance. However, as we understand it, the DNR is planning on sending the letters anyway.
As shown by the many comments from hunters on the petition, many hunters do not want the radio-collared bears shot. They want to learn, same as we do. Such a hunter spoke out today on the Minneapolis Star Tribune Outdoors blog. A hunter-guide who goes by the name T. R. urged hunters to spare the radio-collared bears in our study. His good words are at Asking Bear Hunters Not to Shoot Research Bears .
WCCO-TV will air a news story Monday evening about Lily and family and how important they are for education. The teaser they are running to gain viewers for the news broadcast coming up this Monday focuses on the bounty that people placed on Lily on a Facebook page. That is one of the reasons we need protection for radio-collared bears.
A Lily fan discovered an article about the research that has a January 5 date on it, so some of you may already have seen it at http://www.discoverwildlife.com/animals/black-bear-whisperer.
Sylvia Dolson, Executive Director of the Get Bear Smart Society, sent us the link to the full article on fatal black bear attacks from 1900 through 2009 at http://www.bearsmart.com/docs/black-bear-fatal-attacks-JWM%202011-Herrero-et-al.pdf. The article is big in the news across Canada and the US. Author Steve Herrero was kind to send us a personal prepublication copy. It will come out in the Journal of Wildlife Management this month. It is hard to get an exact count on fatal attacks by black bears because of sketchy information in some cases about the species of bear and whether the person was killed or scavenged. Some of the cases require judgment calls about whether to include or not. The numbers of fatal attacks we have compiled over the years nearly matches those of Herrero et al., but we included at least one fatal attack they excluded, and we excluded one they included.
Without digging out the records, one of those was in Minnesota. As we recall, a man went fishing along a stream a half century ago and didn’t return. When people found his body a few days later, he had been fed upon by several bears. Had one of them killed him? Hard to say. It was one they included and we hadn’t.
In another case, a man climbed a tree to escape a mother and cubs. He fell from the tree and was found dead at the base. Had the mother climbed up and thrown him out? They excluded it, and we included it. Hard to say what is right.
In another case, a woman had taken a walk with her estranged husband who had a history of abusing her. She disappeared. When she was found, a bear was eating her. The investigators said there was very little blood at the scene. Were the bears scavenging her or did she die of another cause? We both included it.
The link to show support for making the black bear Minnesota’s state mammal is at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/BlackBear-MNState-Mammal/. Anyone, anywhere, of all ages can sign it if you have an email address. You don’t have to be from Minnesota to sign it.
In the Readers Digest contest to win money for Ely, you still have Ely securely in 6th place (in the money) with only 3 days to go. 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.
Thank you for all you are doing.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center