A couple weeks ago, I ended with Doc Erickson offering to be my graduate advisor and have me come to the University of Michigan. Here’s what followed.
Lynn Rogers preparing tranquilizer
“Yes,” I said, “That’d be great!” I was hearing an offer that could set the course of my life. I later would learn that two of the owners of the Dayton-Hudson Corporation, Wally and Mary Lee Dayton, had offered a full scholarship if the University could find the right Ph.D. student to study black bears in Minnesota. Wally had shot a grizzly during a hunt in Alaska and had subsequently developed a deep interest in bears. He discovered the lack of information about black bears in his home state of Minnesota and wanted to know more.
Doc was offering me this great opportunity even though I had another year of undergraduate school and a master’s program to complete before I would be eligible. Too stunned to be ecstatic, I asked how I could complete the master’s program in time. Doc had an idea. He asked Lou Verme if I could return to Cusino the next summer (1968) and use some of the data for a master’s thesis. Lou, Ralph Blouch, and other officials met and agreed. I could return. No intern had ever been allowed to come back a second summer. Filled with gratitude, I again resolved to work as hard as I could.
By the time El returned at the end of the month, he had heard I was coming back. He asked how many bears I’d ear-tagged. Knowing his record was 26 in a year, I hesitated to say we’d ear-tagged 26 in a month. I told him the number. Not one to worry about competition, El said, “We’ll catch twice that many together next summer.”
As it turned out, we ear-tagged nearly five times as many—126. It was a summer of scarce natural food. Hungry bears were turning to dumps, garbage cans, bird feeders, and campgrounds in unusual numbers. El and I responded to calls for help. We talked with many landowners and campground managers. They told of rogue bears that terrorized neighborhoods and how people didn’t dare go out at night or let their children play outside. I could feel their fear as they spoke.
El and I captured bears using dart guns, culvert traps, jaw traps, or by climbing trees and injecting them with syringes on the ends of sticks. Their timid reactions touched me. All just wanted to escape—day or night. The more I saw of them, the more I realized how misunderstood they are. In two summers and over 150 captures:
- No bear came after us and hurt us.
- Darted bears we chased never turned back to defend themselves unless we were within touching distance, and even then they chose to escape when we stepped back a couple yards.
- Black bear mothers would bluff-charge but not attack, even when we were holding their screaming cubs in our hands.
- Bluff charges typically included a series of bounds, with the bear blowing and slamming its feet down with each bound, ending with the bear turning away at about 20 feet.
- When I climbed trees to tranquilize treed bears, they all retreated to the top, making it easy to inject them with a syringe on the end of a long stick and then tie a rope around an ankle to lower them to the ground by looping the rope around a branch.
- People who complained about bears usually were less concerned about what the bears did than what they thought the bears might do.
- No bear snarled or growled.
- Injecting tranquilizer into fatty areas was ineffective because fat has too little blood to spread tranquilizer quickly through the body.
- Tranquilizer doses should be based on lean weight, not fat weight, to avoid overdoses.
As I left Michigan, I had three questions:
- How do bears live?
- Could research methods be kinder and gentler?
- And how could I ever thank these people? I felt that the answer to that might be to build on the opportunities they had given me by answering the first two questions. Trying to accomplish that became my career.
Thank you for all you do.
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center