At 1:15 PM, summer officially arrived. Lily, Hope, and Faith celebrated by eating cattails, a bear food that went undetected in the bear diet for years. Cattails don’t come through in identifiable form. They bite the stalk off at the base, strip the tough outer parts away, and eat the soft starchy core that comes through as nothing we ever saw in nature. When analyzing droppings to learn what bears eat back in the old days, we had to label some contents as unknown vegetation. We didn’t know they ate cattails until we started walking with bears and they showed us—as in the video today at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PymaUwE1m2w.
It is interesting to watch how Faith keeps tabs on Hope—always looking around to check Hope’s whereabouts. They are a ‘sister act’ that’s a joy to see. Someday they will be competitors, but for now they are best buds (picture left).
Yesterday, the dragonfly that had hatched out on June 19 was still on the yellow water lily but had dried out and darkened into an identifiable Horned Clubtail Dragonfly.
Thank you for all you are doing.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center