After learning that the Michigan Department of Conservation selected me for a research internship at its famous Cusino Wildlife Research Station at Shingleton, Michigan, I couldn’t wait to get there. After finals were over at Michigan State University,
Dr. Rogers with fawn I left for Shingleton a couple days early to give me time to photograph Kirtland’s Warblers near Mio, Michigan, on the way.
Thank goodness, I arrived at the Research Station a day early. The only person there was Director Lou Verme. He was up on a ladder changing a light bulb. He told me he had assigned me to his penned deer study. I was grateful he’d selected me to work with him personally, but I was on the verge of tears. I had promised not to argue, but I couldn’t help saying how much I’d hoped to work with bears. He was quiet for a minute, looking thoughtful on the ladder, and then said, “Well, I haven’t said anything to the other intern yet, so I guess you can be the bear intern. Neither of us realized what a career crossroads those words represented.
The next day, I met my immediate boss, El Harger, a top naturalist. With a flicker of a smile, he told me my job was to keep the pickup clean and ready for an early start each morning. He said, “Right now, you can do the windshield because we have a bear to get out of a culvert trap down the road.”
Lynn RogersAs we drove, I asked him what he did with bears. Two topics put excitement in his voice—catching bears and hunting bears. For hunting, he had plott hounds that were specially bred to attack bears. Lean and athletic, El told me how he runs with the hounds to see them attack bears and run them up trees. Everything was new to me. I couldn’t hear enough. He told me about his hounds treeing a bear that decided to come down and make a run for it just as El arrived at the tree. The bear brushed by El as it cleared out. I was incredulous. How could a bear come that close to him without attacking? El’s matter-of-fact tone sounded like there was no danger. This was so contrary to the artist’s depictions of angry bears charging with teeth bared in the hunting magazines. Had he ever been injured? “Never,” he said. I could see I would learn a lot from him. That day—June 24, 1967—marked the beginning of my bear research. The data became part of my master’s thesis. I was incredibly lucky to get that job.
Despite El’s assuring words of close calls with no consequences, when we arrived at the location and worked our way through the crowd to the trap, the scared bear did not allay my fears. Helpless and surrounded, it was defensive, clacking its teeth and blowing and slapping at ventilation holes in the trap. El showed me how to load a syringe with succinylcholine chloride, which became the subject of my master’s thesis. He put the syringe on the end of a stick and, when the bear wasn’t looking, jabbed the bear through one of the ventilation holes. The bear whirled but did not growl. A couple minutes later, the bear was down. El raised the door, and we dragged the bear out. We lifted it into the back of the pickup where El gave it a longer lasting sedative, sodium pentobarbital, for our 40-mile ride to the release site.
I tried to reconcile what I’d seen with what I’d always heard. Despite its odd tooth-clacking mixed with defensive behavior, it was not as aggressive and vocal as I had expected. El said the image of bears in hunting magazines is a joke—that the magazines commission artists to draw the most terrifying images they can imagine. El said he had never met a real black bear that was anything like that. I was learning a lot.
More tomorrow.
(Note from editor - Since a photo was not sent, I dug up some old shots of Dr. Rogers. My guess is many of you have never seen these.)
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center