After being in four hospitals most of the time since my left ankle replacement surgery of February 6, our medical insurance ran out yesterday and I was discharged. I thanked everyone I could. It was an experience of everyone having smiling faces and happy voices as they did everything they could to take care of me as I was doing everything I could to follow doctors’ orders. I’m still wearing a special boot, but I can now touch the ground with it and am walking with no pain in he foot. The only pain that remains is in my right knee that is bone on bone, making me think I’ll have it fixed this coming winter. I haven’t been able to take nature walks with Donna for quite a while, but now with the ankle healing, she’s coming up with good ideas for nature trips that will be mostly driving until I have the knee done.
Thinking of bears, I’m hoping that the DNR will renew my research permit to complete and publish studies that the DNR prematurely interrupted back in 2014. On the bright side, nearly all the study bears of 2014 are still alive and available, including den bears Lily and Jewel. I doubly hope the permit is renewed so I can forget the time gap and put the DNR in a good light when we do final filming in June. I want the film to be about what we learned and not what I’ve faced in trying to learn it and educate about it.
While I was in the hospital, Donna put food out for wildlife at the WRI and got closer and closer to the pair of bald eagles. On our way from the hospital to the WRI yesterday, we bought some drumsticks for the them, but I was in another room working when Donna put them out and had her best experience of all and I saw her excitement when she told me about it after the eagles had gone. She told me how the pair had swooped close as she was putting the drumsticks out and and eagle snatched one just seconds after she got in the door and all of the drumsticks shortly disappeared.
Eagle on lower branch
Today, back at ‘work,’ so to speak, I personally got to see the results of her month of dealing with the eagles. One swooped in and landed low on a bushy little sapling at the edge of the yard. While I was getting my camera, it flew up to a higher branch (top photo) where it calmly eyed me through tiny branches as I snapped his or her picture through a window.
When I was gone getting a couple pounds of fat trimmings from a refrigerator, the eagle disappeared. Anxious to get the fat trimmings in place, I quickly put them in place and hurried back inside to get my camera, but within seconds of coming in the eagle had nearly the whole pile in it's two feet and was heading away. I suspect the fat filled the eagle up—and maybe it’s mate, too, because I didn’t see either of them for hours. But late in the afternoon one cruised past. To come up with something for it, I cut a pound of sliced bologna in half and put the halves out. I checked their usual perch, and there the pair was sitting shoulder to shoulder. A minute later one took flight toward the bologna. I jumped in position to click the camera, but the eagle was too quick for me. The fraction of a second that would have made a picture was quicker than I could react.
With the camera at my face, I saw little more than the eagle flying off with its feet full. I suspect they shared the bonanza because within four minutes the perched eagle flew off after the grabber. Neither one appeared for hours. The temperature was around 40F, and the female might have had some incubating to do. This is the time of year when eagles here lay eggs. Whatever the case, both were back perched shoulder to shoulder on their usual perch at 6:58 PM, 21 minutes before sunset on this day before the spring equinox. The next time I looked, both were gone—probably to their nest tree that may be a big white pine where eagles have nested year after year only a mile away.
Raccoon
The day ended with a mother raccoon and her three big youngsters (last year’s babies) stopping by. The mother quickly got the remaining half pound of bologna and made off with it with one of the youngsters in tow, and the two other youngsters posed for pictures looking at me in the window. A good end of day.
It’s likely we’ll be seeing our first bears within a month.
Thank you for all you do,
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center