With me leaving for Alaska tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM, I’ll be missing the action here. The staff at the Bear Center will be doing the updates on the bears there, 
Female yearling eating dandelionswhich is timely with Tasha settling in. Today, they began trying to give her a bottle like we did Holly as a yearling to facilitate contact and bonding between her and as many people as possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAbYnXRzleo. She pulled the nipple off the bottle so the staff gave her the rest in a bowl.
Male yearlingAt WRI, Mike Johnson will be taking care of the bears and identifying who comes and how much he or she weighs and noting any interactions. 10-year-old Bow and 14-year-old Braveheart were among the visitors today. Bow chased two yearlings, a male and a female, up a tree. They weren’t her yearlings traveling together because she had 3 females. Mike will have to dig into the catalog to get clues from the pictures I took. After Bow left, they came down and ate dandelions that have gone to seed. One gave a weight of 76 pounds. The best guess here is that they are Lily’s.
Painted turtlePainted turtles and snapping turtles are making their annual trek to the edges of the driveway here to lay eggs.
I give my two PowerPoint presentations on Monday, June 13, sometime between 2 and 4 PM at the International Bear Conference. They are fast-moving and informative and could help bears if decision-makers hear and see them. We plan to post them where everyone can see them and share them to spread the word. One is on Black Bear Language. The other is on Diversionary Feeding and the project that grew out of that using close-up observation to finally learn how black bears live.
Thank you for all you do.
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center