Well, it wasn’t exactly quiet while Jason was cutting the waist-high grass in the yard in preparation for the bear course that starts this Sunday, but certainly quiet bear-wise.
Today was a day of summarizing data, so bear news is slim. GPS locations showed us that most of the bears are doing their things out in the woods, although the GPS locations for Jo and cub showed that she moved to the edge of Tower and then quickly moved a third of a mile away.
There is so much data we want to organize and publish. Two items at the forefront just now are:
- The reams of data from the two den cams. We have the 2010 data summarized and are working on the 2011 data. For newcomers, a big team of dedicated den-watchers around the world recorded minute by minute what the bears did in the den from the beginning of January through March. With about 25 lines of data per page, it would make a stack of pages over two feet tall. Eventually, it will boil down to some graphs and a few pages of published data. It is exciting to see the patterns of activity emerge from the data.
- The GPS locations the bears are giving us are turning into another huge file of exciting data. All our work of going far into the woods to change GPS batteries every 10-14 days and frequently download the data is turning into the best movement data we have ever obtained. There are so many ways to analyze it. It was wonderful today to watch a year of June’s travels unfold like a video from the time she left her den in spring 2010 until she denned up in fall. Her territory on the computer screen pulsed with the seasons. We want next to see how the travels of the various bears fit with those of their bear neighbors, relate to their human neighbors, and vary with the seasons.
Thank you for your orders and support. The crew at the North American Bear Center is shipping out mail bags full of “The Bear Family and Me” video sets. For those who missed it, 3-DVD sets (3 hours) of the full-length, uncut, BBC version of that series are available on the North American Bear Center web store at http://www.bear.org/website/gift-shop.html?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images.tpl&product_id=841&category_id=8. The series features Lily and Hope, of course, plus Juliet and her three cubs Sharon, Shirley, and The Boy Named Sue, along with Gordon Buchanan, Lynn, and Sue.
There is a problem with Facebook Notes that is giving us fits. The pictures aren’t formatting correctly and the links don’t work unless you copy and paste them into your browser. Hopefully a future change will correct this one! The updates still work find on bearstudy.org though.
Thank you for your orders and all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center