2-year-old female3-year-old Aster and 7-year-old Lily (with yearlings Eli and Ellie) each used an area a mile long today, while 5-year-old Jewel and 11-year-old Juliet and their cubs remained in areas a third that long. With bears on the move, some are showing up at community feeding stations. We snapped a photo of this skittish 132-pound female (probably a 2-year-old) to compare her facial pattern to records of bears we’ve seen in the past.
This is the time of year the community looks for their favorites to appear. A sighting generates phone calls to interested neighbors. We especially look for One-eyed Jack. We first met him in 2002 when he was 4-6 years old (243 pounds on August 9 that year). His good manners quickly made him a favorite at the community feeding station he visited. He was shy away from feeding stations, as is usual, that we don’t know of anyone seeing him in the woods other than us. He was so attracted to Braveheart that he would follow her and mate with her even if we were with her. In 2006, he made the mistake of coming too close to Midge when big Lumpy was courting her. Jack lost the fight, which Sue videoed for the Bear Center exhibit on courtship and mating (http://www.bear.org/website/bear-pages/black-bear/reproduction/14-mating-battle-combatants.html). Over the years, we have taken many heart rates from gentle Jack, who was shown in the 2009 BBC documentary Bearwalker of the Northwoods.
12-year-old Braveheart is another bear we’re looking for. We’ve watched her and radio-tracked her since she was born to Blackheart in 2002. She dropped her collar last spring (2013) shortly before the DNR put a prohibition on both placing and replacing radio-collars. An older photo of her is featured in the recent Minneapolis Star Tribune article (http://www.startribune.com/local/257602301.html). To get that picture, Lynn, the reporter, and the photographer followed Braveheart’s telemetry signal with Lynn calling to her for about 2 hours while Braveheart circled out of sight in the dense forest. Finally, she trusted Lynn’s voice and came for a treat, a heart rate, and a collar adjustment.
Another memory is of Lynn calling to her and trying to approach in very dense brush as he homed in on her with telemetry. Lynn glimpsed her and then went to the spot where she had disappeared and looked in all directions. No bear. Then something moved two feet away. Braveheart had been standing patiently next to Lynn the whole time.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center