Jewel counts her toes - Jan 15, 2012The magic 22nd hour of labor came and went with no cubs and no body-slamming like Lily did. Are we seeing differences in labor behavior and duration between 2 bears? Do female bear labors differ as much as female humans do? Or were we wrong about her labor? Whatever the story, we have no doubt that Jewel will have cubs, given the great swelling we saw. Jewel has been going through cycles of restless activity and periods of deep sleep. Not all bears are the same. We’ll learn how Jewel differs from Lily. Throughout our research, the more bears we observed, the harder it became to answer questions with certainty.
Jewel grooming - Jan 15, 2012We know what we saw with Lily (restlessness, licking, teeth-clenching, body-slamming, etc.) but we don’t know if labor signs are the same for all bears. So we are watching carefully for any unusual behavior that might signify labor. Last evening we watched as Jewel rested with her head up. Her head ‘bobbed’ rhythmically up and down. Then she stretched out and rested her head. We watched as her ears trembled in a rhythmic pattern. We interpreted those as early signs of labor. We have put together a video of those ‘early signs’ at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC1nyGWrtWo.
Jewel appears to hold her head in her paw - Jan 15, 2012While we wait on Jewel, we’ll take this opportunity to begin answering questions we have gotten about the effects of people feeding bears. An introductory PowerPoint presentation (18 minutes) narrated by Lynn can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/bearstudy#p/u/18/LGQcGEzy6Oc.
The theme of the questions is: “When bears get used to being fed by people (becoming habituated and food-conditioned, as they say), do they approach people and hunters? Do they become nuisances and jeopardize public safety? Do they get themselves killed?” The questions make human sense, but do they make bear sense?
Jewel chews bedding - Jan 15, 2012A subset of those questions asks: “Was that what got Hope killed?” The short answer is no. Hope was killed at a hunter’s bait like thousands of non-fed bears. She probably wouldn’t have been shot if she were wearing a radio-collar. The DNR asks hunters not to shoot radio-collared bears, and the hunter who shot her respects that. We had hoped that any hunter who hunted in Lily’s territory would recognize her and her radio-collar and little cub Faith with her and refrain from shooting yearling Hope.
Jewel - Jan 12, 2012We had tried over and over to radio-collar Hope, and the four times we were successful she took the radio-collars off. She was a bear who just didn’t want to wear one. We could have drugged her (risking her life) to put a collar on so tight she could not get it off, but that would have ruined her trust. Without trust, we’d have had to drug her every time we needed to adjust the collar for growth, and who knows if she would get trap-shy after awhile? The whole thing was a research disappointment and a personal disappointment. The hunter told us that fed bears come more cautiously to baits than hungry non-fed bears.
In future updates, we’ll hit the broader questions above with examples and data.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center