Jewel tends to a cub - Feb 11, 2012We love the peaceful sounds of happy cubs nursing, and that’s what poured out of Jewel’s den today. Despite the cold, that one would think would cause some cries for warmth, we heard a lot of nursing—two cubs in unison. Now at 20 days of age, they apparently have things figured out—how to reach the nipples, which nipples are whose, and how to hang on for secure, steady nursing.
Jewel tends her cubs - Feb 11, 2012With one scientific paper in the final stages of completion, we shifted gears and did some desk organization in preparation for the next one. But… desk organization is tedious, so it was easy to get distracted by 7-year-old Keefer’s scat contents from August 12 waiting to be recorded. When we saw her scat filled with seed, we had to collect it and count them. They were mostly seeds from red-osier dogwood and alder-leafed buckthorn—both native shrubs. We wanted an idea of how hard she was working—how many berries she ate to make that scat. As it turned out, there were 4,790 red-osier dogwood seeds, 902 alder-leafed buckthorn seeds, 58 wild sarsaparilla seeds, and a trace of ant parts.
|
berry |
seeds per berry |
count of seeds |
berries eaten |
|
red-osier dogwood |
1 |
4,790 |
4,790 |
|
alder-leaf buckthorn |
3 |
902 |
301 |
|
wild sarsaparilla |
5 |
58 |
12 |
Jewel and cub - Feb 11, 2012But 5,103 berries would take some serious foraging. We don’t know how many scats she made in 24 hours. It depends upon how much she ate. A quick look at how many scats other bears made in August in other years showed 4, 11, 3, and 6. Not much help, but Keefer’s 283-gram scat was only a fraction of what she ate that day. If she equaled even the lowest number, 3 scats, she would have had to eat somewhere in the ball park of 15,300 berries. Or, if we take the average of 4, 11, 3, and 6, which is 6, she might have eaten somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 berries.
Jewel looks out - Feb 11, 2012It’s hard to determine how much bears eat in the wild. We took a good stab at it, though, walking with bears for 24 hours and collecting and weighing all the scats, including the ones they got up in the middle of the night to deposit. More on that another time. It showed us what efficient berry-eaters bears are. They grab them mostly with their delicate lips, usually swallow them whole, depend on their 2-part stomach to grind them up in the 2nd gizzard-like compartment, and defecate the seeds whole (with fertilizer) to seed the forest with their favorite foods.
Jewel tends to a cub - Feb 11, 2012Thank you for your purchases of the new items from the web store. We’ve gotten good comments about the new extra tall mug that tells Jewel’s life story in pictures. Also the mousepad of her in the den, the canvas shoulder bag with her pretty face, and the frameable 8x10 photo of her. An item we especially like is the new license plate holder that says, “Let’s Talk Bears.”
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center