Pine marten The first customer to a new mountain of warmed suet was the female pine marten. She sniffed the new object and moved on to chip away at the block of date mash that had warmed up to minus 5°F after a night of minus 19°F. She ran after a red squirrel, but the squirrel easily out-maneuvered her in the big dead white pine. She gave up quickly and went back to the date mash. I looked away for a moment and she was gone. I hurried to another window in time to see her leap from the second floor deck to the trunk of a birch tree, to another trunk, and another and then descended to the ground. She ran to a big tree maybe 50 feet away and went from tree to tree like a cautious bear trying to stay close to escape trees. At each tree, she paused and looked around. Was she looking for danger or for a squirrel to chase
Pine martenThe next suet customer was a female hairy woodpecker, followed by a male downy woodpecker for size comparison. Woodpeckers have stiff tails to brace their bodies and give more oomph to each peck. The little downy braced his tail against the suet but the hairy had to brace her tail in the snow against the ground.
Two people had trouble using the email address in the Dec 2 update to get free E-mag subscriptions to the Montana State University magazine. We don’t know if their computers weren’t set to follow an email link or if something was wrong. It worked for others. To be sure, here it is again. Susie wrote: “…if anyone wants a free subscription to the e-Mag, they can send a note to me at
Downy woodpeckerWe have been made aware people were used to clicking on a banner at the top of bear.org to get to the update. We investigated and learned that the link to the update had to be removed a while back. The good news is that update banner will be back up on bear.org when we upgrade the website in the near future.
Hairy woodpecker
Currently you can find the updates by:
• going directly to bearstudy.org (click here for a direct link to the update list)
• via facebook at Lily the Black Bear's page
• on Twitter
• by the text link ("Visit the WRI Website") at the top of bear.org and also by signing up for the daily update email.
Thank you for all you do.
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center