No new bear news today. The GPSed bears are doing the same—Lily at a den, Braveheart likely as well, Jo still moving around. We didn’t check on others.
We thought about Cal today and decided to check a rock den he used briefly as a yearling in the fall of 2009. Nearly every fall for the last 20 years, Lynn and Donna have checked 4 rock dens in Lynn’s old study area (1970’s and 1980’s). Rock dens can last for hundreds of years (or more) and be used by many different bears. During the 1970’s and 1980’s one rock den was used by 3 different bears and another was used by 2 different bears. But Lynn and Donna only found one den re-used in the last 20 years.
Searching for Cal’s rock den was a challenge. The big wind of a few days ago has brought many trees down, making the uplands a tangle. Nothing was recognizable. Usually the high ground is the best place to make good time. Not today. We didn’t get pictures of the tangle because we were concentrating on clambering over and under. It would be hard to follow a bear through those woods! For a change, the easier walking was in the black spruce swamp with its deep moss covering layers of old fallen logs. As logs fall, they slowly disappear. Not so much because they rot, but because they slowly get covered with layers of moss, snowberry, and in some places Labrador tea. Where it is mainly moss and snowberry, the forest floor looks lush and beautiful.
We never did find Cal’s den. It was a wild goose chase. There are days like that.
A couple months ago, several Lily fans helped make a new exhibit by looking up the oldest bears on record for each species. Jessica Higgins, Michelle Johnson, Jeroen Jacobs, Linda MacDonald, and Liz Rosenberg came up with the following (excerpts from their emails).
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Andean Bear
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Poopsie, age 37, still living at the Salisbury Zoo in Salisbury, Maryland. http://www.theshoresofdelmarva.net/739816434/item/ and http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-11-28-geriatric-animals-zoo_N.htm
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Panda Bear
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Ming-Ming, age 34, died of kidney failure May 7, 2011 at a preserve in China. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/17/worlds-oldest-panda-dies-ming-ming-dead_n_863160.html
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Polar Bear
- Debby, age 42, died November 17, 2008 at Winnipeg's Assiniboine Park Zoo in Canada. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/3479968/Worlds-oldest-polar-bear-dies.html
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Grizzly/Brown Bear
- Lester, age 35, at Cleveland Zoo. http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/10/zoo_probes_bears_death_age_and.html
- Female, age 35, in Alaska Zoo. http://kodiak.fws.gov/wildlife_bearfacts.htm
- Female, euthanized at age 44, produced cubs through age 41 at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska according to the zoo director at that time.
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Asian Black Bear
- age 44, oldest in captivity.
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Black Bear
- No. 56, age 37, is a wild bear being radio-tracked by the Minnesota DNR.
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Sun Bear
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Jun, age not given, died in 2007 as the oldest sun bear in the world at the Honolulu zoo.
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So that’s info on 6 of the 8 bear species, leaving the sloth bear and sun bear to go. There is little information on old ages of wild bears, so most of this is from captivity.
In the Wildlife Research Institute’s studies, the oldest bear was a female shot by a hunter at 29 ¾ years of age in 1994. She had been radio-tracked for 20 of those years. Captured as a 9-year-old in 1974, she was the last of the mature territorial females in the study area to be captured even though she lived in the center of the study area. We began trapping there in 1969. Her elusive behavior was probably a factor in her surviving another 20 years in that hunted area. With her teeth in bad shape, she finally went to a hunter’s bait in 1994. We had named her Minda Moye—which we were told is Ojibway for Old Lady.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center