Lily and Faith in the rock den on October 3 - they visited this den again yesterday and todayHunting season ended at 6:19 PM with thousands still mourning the death of Hope. From her first cries on January 22, 2010, through her struggles to her playful comradery with Faith, she became known, loved, and now missed, as her memory and what she stood for lives on.
After Lily and Faith left their cedar swamp yesterday afternoon, they moved a mile, checked the rock den at 8:43 PM and left within 20 minutes to bed down nearly a half mile away in the vicinity of the clover patch they used repeatedly this summer. By 4:49 PM today, they were back at the rock den but possibly still undecided. At 6:42 PM, Lily’s GPS location showed her heading away from it back toward the cedar swamp. What goes into deciding when and where to den for the winter? If she enters her choice of den tomorrow, she will be 5 days earlier than last year.
Braveheart is doing much the same thing. After creating a quick den yesterday, she is on the move. She typically does this and is one of the last bears to den up when she is with cubs.
Jo is still active, too.
About 7 AM today, we discovered good news about Ursula and her 2 cubs. We checked her telemetry signal and found that she moved from an inaccessible area to a more accessible one not far from where she tried out a den last fall. We’ll see what she does.
At about that time, Shirley was still the same place she was a couple days ago. Could she be the most decisive bear of all, moving directly to a place and settling? We’ll see.
We located Sharon by telemetry (from afar) and can now check her movements.
There was no way to get to June today to change her GPS batteries and get her GPS locations flowing to our computer again. We’ll get to her as soon as we can.
At 5:40 PM, there was suddenly a flurry of chickadee activity at bird feeders that are hidden away up under the eaves of the field station. We haven’t seen a bird visit those feeders since March even though they had sunflower seeds in them throughout the summer. Lynn stepped out with a handful of sunflower seeds and had 7 visitors in quick succession. The hand-feeding flock of chickadees is back for the winter.
Today, for a publication we are working on, we totaled up the hours of data recording while walking with bears in the woods back in 1986 through 1991. We don’t have all the data together yet, but the total hours so far is 2,665 hours and 24 minutes. That is a lot of time spent close-up with wild bears. We hope we can do the bears justice with many scientific publications and a book or two from that data set and the more recent data set from the new study area of these last 15 years (1996 to the present). Those are needed, but to make a real difference for bears, it is necessary to go the extra mile and share the information with the many people who now can participate in learning and educating others through the internet. That’s where multitudes can replace myths with facts. People won’t coexist with animals they fear, which is why we think it is so important for people to learn about real bears, hopefully from the bears themselves, and change their attitudes as so many have done by watching Hope, Lily, and the others. People are learning one by one and by the classroom. We are looking forward to the Education Minnesota conference on the 20th at 10:15 AM at the River Center in St Paul, Minnesota. Our being at the conference started with Lily and Hope and came to fruition through a first grade class that followed them.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center