Juliet's cub up closeJuliet’s cubs are crazy cute right now—and they are teaching us new things. Yesterday, a Den-Watcher recorded the first huff-slap. Juliet is regularly backing into her ‘latrine’ area to relieve herself. We are collecting good data on elimination of body waste during hibernation.
Juliet and cubWe would like to stream the Den Cams live to the public—or at least post highlight videos to illustrate the behaviors we are observing. The cubs are growing up. The DNR’s concern that the Den Cams cause some people to develop emotional attachments to the bears shouldn’t justify denying educational opportunities to many thousands of students and members of the public.
Three cubsA highlight today was seeing our bear-snake paper published in the online version of the journal Ethology at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eth.12236/abstract. We opted to make it available online to the public. When you click the link, you will see the abstract of “Black bear reactions to venomous and non-venomous snakes in Eastern North America” and can select to view the entire paper online or download as a PDF.
Another highlight was reading the Proposed Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law (63 pages, double spaced) assembled by our legal team led by David Marshall of Fredrikson & Byron. He and his associates Leah Janus and Jessica Edwards submitted a very thorough and extremely well researched piece of work to Judge Tammy Pust today.
 Cub lays paws on Juliet |
 Juliet licks cub |
 Cute cub |
 Juliet wants to sleep |
 Cub looks our way |
 Pause in play |
 Juliet chews footpads |
 Cautious exploration |
 Siblings |
 Touching noses |
 Playing hard! |
 Family of four |
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center