Braveheart has given us the slip again. After catching sight of her last night ‘sans collar’ we headed out this morning to retrieve it. Fall is a great time to be in the woods and this gave us an excuse. After picking up the collar we wandered the woods hoping to run into her to slip it back on. We didn’t find her but every walk we take is a new story. Today, we took pictures of items along the way to share with you.
Deep in the forest, we came upon on opening with the ground packed down. It was a marking area, maybe the ‘community newspaper’ for bears. The main marking was not on the big red pines, but on the little dead, broken tree that was smooth from rubbing and bitten at about 4 and a half feet high, showing that it was marked mostly by young bears.
Maybe a hundred feet from the marking area, a young bear was resting high in a white pine with a favorite configuration of branches. Where something killed the main leader years ago, two side branches took over and made a safe bed for young bears to rest on a windy, scary day like today. We saw a ribbon and checked with telemetry to see whose signal was close. It was yearling Shirley.
Bears prefer white pines for refuge but also use red pines that have this branch configuration. They seem to know where all the best escape trees are. This white pine had a bed at the base that probably has been used by many bears over the years.
The leaves on red maples were living up to their name.
Next we saw a log shredded by a bear or bears in their search for insects in this year of scarce berries.
The next bit of bear sign was digging in a wet area that dried up in the drought this year. We suspect the digging was for roots or insect larvae. We wish we had been walking with the bears to see what they were getting here.
At the edge of the dried marsh was Braveheart’s radio-collar. Disappointment. They had played with it and broken a couple of the orange ribbons, but the bright yellow heavy plastic stands up to anything and always is highly visible, even in low light. We hoped she and the 3 cubs were bedded in the area, so we covered a lot of ground calling and looking for them. No luck.
A bed in a dried up mud puddle showed how bears cooled off on the hot days.
A little farther on, a bed in the mud where a tree had fallen shows the same behavior. The shallow roots of the fallen tree are a result of the shallow soil of this part of Minnesota.
Still further, a cedar tree that is leaning 45 degrees is a favorite kind of spot for a den. The upturned roots bring up a mound of soil that protects the bears from snow. The spot showed sign of bears resting on the mound, climbing the leaning trunk (probably to play), and going in and out of the “den” and probably resting in the cool soil inside it.
Another upturned cedar root mound farther on also had been used.
An anthill showed scant sign of digging. The bears usually pass up anthills because it is about impossible to separate the ant pupae from the soil, but a bear did paw at this one a bit in this year of scarce berries.
A round-leaved dogwood bush showed how the leaves and berries have shriveled.
It doesn’t take much drought to dry up the shallow soil of this area and dry up the berry crop.
Then it was on to Jo and her big single cub to change the batteries in Jo’s GPS unit. A much-needed soaking rain began just as we headed back to the field station.
Our thoughts at the end of the day are we hope we see Donna and Braveheart before they den up so we can know they are safe and so we can give them radio-collars to track them to their dens.
The invited talk Lynn gave at the IBA Conference in July—Can food lead black bears out of trouble—is posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGQcGEzy6Oc.
A video of Hope and Faith playing on Sept 10 is posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ8x6ZX_fhg.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center