Lily and family are so close-knit with the mating season over here that it seems almost certain there will be no family break-up this year. Hope will get another 11 months of playing and foraging in the security of the family. The photos today were taken yesterday of Lily and family, and another video of them has been posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iCHyGaAXcM.
However, mating season is not over in areas where oak forests provide fall food, taking the pressure off to end mating in time to concentrate on feeding on berries. Feeding on berries is not so all important where there are fall foods.
A Lily fan who sees a lot of bears in Wisconsin might be seeing what makes mixed age litters. A mother abandoned her lone cub and ran off chasing a male. A day or two later, the mother was seen being followed by a very interested big male.
This sounds a lot like the scenario when Lily abandoned Hope and mated last year. It is doubly interesting because it is happening over a month later in the year. Lily abandoned hope on May 21 and again on May 31. The Wisconsin mother did it in July when the cub has a better chance of survival than Hope had.
Is this another instance of one cub not providing enough suckling stimulus to prevent ovulation? Will the mother mate and return to the cub like Lily did?
The Lily fan reported that the cub was extra big from getting all the milk. Berries are ripening, so the cub has a food supply. It sounds like chances of survival are good. If the cub does what Hope did, it will travel between the area it was abandoned and the area it spent time with mother in the spring, keeping it in the area where chances are good for a reunion and a mixed age litter next year.
We’ll stay with the story and its parallels with Lily’s family.
We heard good news that the senior author on our paper documenting the natural death of 26-year-old Midge will have a rough draft soon.
Here, we are progressing nicely on the analysis of your observations of Lily and family in 2010 and 2011 on the den cams. Thank you again to the Den-watch Team.
We were also happy to have the editors of Human-Wildlife Interactions journal, which will carry two articles by us in the next issue, ask to use our photographs on occasional covers. A subscription to Human-Wildlife Interactions is $20 per year at http://www.berrymaninstitute.org/journal/index.html .
Thank you again for your orders of the 3-DVD set of the full-length BBC version of “The Bear Family & Me” at http://www.bear.org/website/gift-shop.html?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images.tpl&product_id=841&category_id=8 .
Amazing voting from Lily fans on Soudan Underground Mine State Park! If you are voting for other Minnesota state parks, only your votes for Soudan are helpful to radio-collared bears according to DNR officials we have talked with. That might sound counter intuitive, but it is true. To vote, go to http://www.livepositively.com/#/americasparks/leaderboard . In this contest, we can vote over and over as many times as we can. The Lily Power you are showing with the outstanding first place position of Soudan is amazing.
Thank you for all you do!
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center