Jewel licks frost from her fur - Jan 23, 2013Ho hum. Well, not really. We’ve been busier than the proverbial ‘one-armed paper-hanger’, but not much new with the bears. Just more of the same as the bitter cold weather continues. Tomorrow the temps should creep above zero Fahrenheit and then up into the teens by Friday. We predict there will be more bear action as the weather warms up. Stay tuned!
Another June walk from 2004 posted below.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center
Because June seemed to be in a nocturnal pattern as of late I chose to start the walk with her at noon. The day was quite cool and I didn’t want to get chilled sitting with her all day. I located her in the wetland just east of the eastern clear-cut off the RR grade. She was sitting up as I approached and it was unclear to me whether she had been bedded. She came readily for the nuts and marker-laden marshmallows I brought. She then spent a little time grooming but soon began wandering and feeding on wild calla lily leaves. She stopped to defecate and by looking at the scat I knew she had not been feeding on sunflower seeds that morning. The scat was full of raspberry seeds.
She stopped to drink from the ditch at the foot of the RR grade slope. She then leapt across the ditch and bolted across the RR grade. This began my ‘cat and mouse’ walk with June. We would walk together for a ways then she would bound ahead and I would hurry to catch up only to have her bound ahead again. She did the ‘crazy-bear’ thing where she stood up with her paws on a cedar tree, flung her head side to side wildly, and then lunged in my direction. She stopped at the trees that separated us and then bounded away again. I followed, determined not to give up the walk I had planned. She would settle down for a time but then do the ‘crazy-bear’ thing again and bound away. Dot did this same ‘crazy-bear’ thing once while I was with her. At the time I attributed it to the fact Dot had come upon an area of heavy bear sign and was nervous—perhaps something similar was going on with June. I suspected something was up as she kept sniffing branches intently as we passed (I have since learned there was a bear bait in the area just south of the RR grade that we were passing through). She did the curious ‘knitting’ behavior while urinating and defecating in this same area. She also did some stiff-legged walking. She ran off a couple of times and I lost her for about 15 minutes.
June sleeps soundly - Aug 19, 2004I found her sitting in a balsam thicket. The day had become very windy and this also may have contributed to her behavior. She rested in this thicket for about 45 minutes before settling in to sleep. She then dropped into a very deep sleep—taking only 5-7 breaths a minute and holding each breath before exhaling. She snapped her head up a couple of times at snapping twigs but went right back to sleep again. At one point she made the motor-like comfort sound in her sleep. The wind blew in rain clouds and it sprinkled some while she slept. She rested and slept for 5 hours. When she awoke she groomed some—biting trees nearby as she sat to groom.
She set off foraging, feeding on bunchberry and ant pupae. Her searches for ant pupae did not seem as successful today. An hour and 15 minutes later she bedded in a cedar swamp for 20 minutes—a dog was barking nearby and she was quite attentive to the barking. When she left this bedsite she fed some on cattail leaves. She drew the leaf through her mouth starting at the base of the leaf and then nipped off the end. She manipulated the cattail leaf with her paws as she sat. She also fed on water parsnip, which appeared too mature.
She fed on red-osier dogwood and round-leaf dogwood—the later not yet ripe. She led me to the same red-osier area she had fed in right after digging the den on July 19th. The red-osier in this area had been fed on by bear(s) and I gathered by the way she was sniffing the area that the bear was not June. It appeared as though another bear or bears had wiped out the entire stand of red-osier.
I lost June when she got too far ahead of me in the dark. I hiked out by compass and headlamp and continued to monitor her activities from my car.
Of note:
- As I followed her on this walk I recognized many of the areas we passed through from previous walks. At one point she stopped in the woods to sniff a bird feeder that she had also stopped and sniffed on our very first walk together.
- Her spurts of running often coincided with her crossing ATV trails.