Faith - 8/10/15Two bears I didn’t mention last night are Dot and Donna—Blackheart’s first litter back in 2000—both females. As shown in The Man Who Walks With Bears film, I spent time with both of them when they were 2-3 months old. They, too, never forgot.
Dot was beloved in her territory. She was known for her calm, gentle nature and never hurt anyone or generated a legitimate complaint. Being radio-collared, the DNR put out a kill order on her for a complaint falsely attributed to her from May 20, 2013. When I heard of a DNR culvert trap set for her, I checked it out and found that it held a large male, Dot’s boyfriend, and found two conservation officers with shotguns in hand looking into the woods where Dot had been waiting for the male to rejoin her. The quick look they got of her was likely her retreating from them. Our GPS showed that she quickly moved nearly a mile away, but the CO’s were still there with their guns waiting when I arrived. I asked why they were trying to shoot Dot. They said she had tried to break into a screened in porch at 3 AM a couple weeks earlier on May 20. I said I was surprised to hear that because she had never generated a complaint in her 13 years. They said she was partly into the porch. I asked how far in—was it her nose, her head and shoulders, or just the tip of her claw from scratching the screen? More the latter, CO Sean Williams said. I asked who issued the kill order on her. He said Wildlife Manager Tom Rusch (the same official who had filed falsified complaints as he admitted on the stand under oath). We asked Rusch for copies of recent complaints and received them with identities, locations, and dates deleted. Fortunately, the CO’s had told us the date and time of the supposed screen-scratching incident. We looked for a complaint that would fit that. We found it but it did not mention a radio-collar or yearlings, which she still had with her on that date. We looked up her GPS locations and found that she and the yearlings had spent the night 3 miles away from the trap. I phoned Rusch and told him that Dot could not have been the bear at the screen. He continued the kill order and continued setting traps in the region. He testified that “if Lynn Rogers said it, it was probably a lie.” Dot was not caught.
On September 12, we saw something strange on Google Earth. Her GPS locations moved from her territory down a road to Highway 169 to the CO’s house across the street from me. We went there with telemetry and found Dot’s collar in the passenger seat of his state pickup. I knocked on his door. He came out, and I asked him what happened. He wanted to be polite because we are neighbors and my wife Donna sometimes takes care of his kids. Picking his words carefully, he hesitatingly said that she was “killed…in a…hunting…situation.” I asked, “Do you mean she was killed by a hunter?” He hesitated again and finally said, “Yeess.” As if it wasn’t quite a hunting situation. He wouldn’t say any more.
I phoned a resident who knew Dot and said she had been killed. When he repeated it, I heard his wife in the background give the most anguished wail I had ever heard.
DNR complicity in her death was obvious, but we never received the details. Dot had been continually collared from the time she left Blackheart as a yearling, making her the longest tracked bear in our study in this area.
Of interest here, is the fact that this bear that had no fear of me, nearly from birth, and who would come to the voices of the couple that maintained Dot’s favorite community feeding station, did not transfer those bonds to anyone else and never generated a legitimate complaint. All of this is very contrary to DNR propaganda that we are training bears to come up to people for food and that feeding creates nuisance complaints and jeopardizes public safety.
On to Donna and her four cubs. Now 15 years old, we are not aware of any complaint ever generated by this gentle, trusting bear who lives out in the wild except for her visits to 4 community feeding stations. Again, her life is in contrast to DNR beliefs and propaganda. What spurred this update was walking up to Donna in the dark tonight and seeing her all but ignore me as I passed within a foot of her. She did not feel threatened and is absolutely no threat.
We are anxious to get the honest truth out about these bears. We see that Lily Fans are helping.
The Bear Course that ended today enabled us to get to know more wonderful Lily Fans. We thoroughly enjoyed all of them and hated to see the course end. Now we’re looking forward to the next course, starting Sunday.
Thank you for all you do.
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center