Juliet - Sept 8, 2012Again, everything seems copacetic. It’s after shooting hours, and all the radio-collared bears are accounted for. After locating Juliet to change her GPS batteries and Sharon to spin her collar around, all those with GPS units are back ‘on the map.’ As their winter coats grow in thick, those beribboned collars no longer spin back upright on their own. Collars are getting snug, but we hesitate to loosen them for fear they’ll be lost during this critical time. We’ll visit dens early to loosen or replace the tight radio-collars so these bears can comfortably curl up this winter.
Sybil - Sept 8, 2012We received good news tonight. One-eyed Jack was seen for the first time since the evening of Sept 1. Jack trusts us, and as a result he provides us with data on courtship, mating, and mate fidelity that would be very hard to get without him. We get some of that with Big Harry, too, but we haven’t been worried about him. He left over a week before hunting season, so we are assuming his disappearance is the normal dispersal from this area we see each year among the big males in late August. We worried about Jack because we heard shots that were not accounted for a few days ago and had not seen him since.
Fall colors are coming on, enhancing our views of local wildlife.
White-tailed deer - Sept 8, 2012What a great place to live and study bears. This area is unusually safe—even at night—making it easier to walk with bears here than in many other areas. This area has no dangerous snakes. The two small, non-poisonous snakes here are usually so small they can’t break the skin even if you pick them up and let them bite you. There are no bad spiders—no brown recluse or black widows. Also, no chiggers or scorpions. Lynn has never seen a deer tick (Lyme tick) in his 43 years here, although we hear there are a few now. We’ve put road-killed bears on big plastic sheets to collect the ticks as they crawl off the bear. We recorded hundreds of mostly harmless dog ticks (Dermacentor variabilis) but no deer ticks. We walk the woods without worries. There is no poison oak, no poison sumac, and very little poison ivy. We know of a few patches of poison ivy in disturbed areas, but we rarely run into it walking the woods.
White-tailed deer - Sept 8, 2012Our job working with bears is about as safe as you can get. Traffic on the forest roads is extremely light, and the bumps keep speeds down. Lynn’s biggest danger in years past was airplane crashes (2) while radio-tracking. We know 13 bear biologists who have died that way, but we seldom have to fly now that we have GPS. Probably our greatest danger is getting a twig in the eye or slipping on wet rocks and logs.
Bears are the least of our worries. The scratches and nips we occasionally get are no more injurious than would be inflicted by puppies. We have never had a bear come after us and hurt us in 45 years of pushing the envelope. Bears are capable of hurting us but not inclined to. They show great restraint. We couldn’t do what we do if bears were like most people think.
The volunteers made more strides today, arranging the garage for winter, making a big dump run, installing a second new faucet (the first proved faulty), and making a great supper with foods Lily Fans provided.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center