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Lily's in labor! - UPDATE January 22, 2010

January 22, 2010 - 10:35 AM CST

Lily is keeping over 14,000 viewers in suspense.  Among them are the researchers who stayed up all night logging bouts of labor and being amazed at Lily’s occasional body slams.  We suspect hard cramps are what make her slam her body around in the den so hard the camera shakes and booms.  We have never heard of such behavior.  Is this common during labor, or is it unique to Lily?   We first observed labor yesterday at 1:59 PM CST (we’re in Minnesota) as Lily lay on her back flexing the muscles of her head as she clenched her teeth for 41 minutes.  She then left the den briefly—perhaps to defecate due to pressure on her colon from the fetuses.  At 4:23 to 4:30 PM, she had another bout of labor trying to stand on all fours, pushing up against the roof of the den and straining.  The bouts continued all night with no particular pattern of timing.  Especially violent body slams were at 10:51, 10:52, and 10:54 PM.

With help from the Associated Press and radio stations across the country, more and more people are learning about bears from Lily and from the information on bear.org.   There was a 10,000% increase in visitors to bear.org yesterday than the same day last year, and we hope it keeps growing.  To keep the website from crashing, we shut down the web store and membership area temporarily.  This means we also had to delay introduction of the Lily t-shirts.  We are extremely delighted to see such interest in bears.  We again thank everyone who is helping with donations.  There is so much more we want to do when the debt is paid off.

We are looking forward to the birth, not as the culmination of the watch but as the beginning of learning how Lily cares for the cubs through each stage of their development.

—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, North American Bear Center


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