We’re going ‘nuts’
We’re going ‘nuts’
March 11, 2010 – 5:50 PM CST
It‘s obvious from the many responses to the recent request for raw nuts that folks are eager to help! It is SO wonderful that there are so many people wanting to donate nuts! However, there’s a lot of confusion about what the nuts are for and what we can accept for nuts. Let me explain.
Pecans and filberts (hazelnuts) are our ‘drug of choice’ when working with the research bears. We do not tranquilize our research bears. Jabbing bears with syringes would erode the mutual trust we’ve worked so hard to develop and occasionally the drugs kill—something referred to by researchers as ‘handling loss.’ Instead of tranquilizing drugs, we use nuts—preferably raw pecan halves or raw filberts. These are expensive nuts and we use them judiciously for collaring, adjusting collars, changing batteries in GPS units, taking heart rates, tying ribbons on collars before hunting season, etc. These nuts are not used to ‘feed’ the bears. The research bears do well finding food on their own.
Will the nuts be given to Lily?
Yes, eventually some will. We’ve all noticed Lily’s collar getting loose. We’ll need to give her a few nuts to occupy her while we tighten her collar before she leaves the den area. We may change her collar entirely and give her one with a GPS attached. However, we have no intention of running to Lily’s den and dumping a pile of nuts for her. We just don’t do that. The radio-collared research bears live normal lives just like other bears in the area.
Can I send nuts from my yard?
Sorry, but we can’t accept them. Often wild nuts contain pests that make transportation and storage problematic and in some cases just plain illegal. We really need commercial nuts from a processing plant. And whole nuts are best. When the few nuts we give them are gone, the bears quickly go back to foraging. Smaller pieces just drop in the leaf litter and then the bear spends half an hour searching out each speck before returning to forage. Bigger is better.
Some folks have expressed concern that Hope may not learn to forage on wild foods. Please rest assured that not will happen!
I’ve spend hundreds (if not thousands) of hours walking with these radio-collared research bears. Each walk starts with a handful of nuts for the bears—then no food. Not for the bears, not for me. And no physical contact. Nothing to distract them from doing ‘bear’ things. They go, I follow—and they ignore me. Through the forests, clear-cuts, swamps, mosquitoes, ticks, and hornets. I’ve been miles from the nearest house with thoroughly habituated mothers and cubs as they ripped open logs for ant pupae and foraged on berries. These bears definitely prefer natural foods in their own territories to anything we could give them—and that’s just fine with us. They’re not our pets.
If you have doubt about what the nuts we provide for these bears do to their wild instincts, please watch the ‘Foraging and Food’ videos on www.bear.org.
Most of these videos feature Lily’s mother June—and if you look closely you can see Lily as a cub in some of them. I strongly encourage you to watch these videos if you haven’t already. Watch Lily as she rips into a bumble bee nest in the ‘Animal Protein’ video—one spunky little cub! As you watch these videos remember—there are several homes in the area that welcome these bears and feed them, but these bears prefer wild foods when available.
Lily is a wild bear, with wild instincts, her daughter Hope will be the same. A bear does not have to be afraid to be wild.
Like many of you, I try to keep the den cam open in the corner of my computer ‘desktop’ as I work. Today I watched with great interest as Lily was lying on her back and Hope was nursing on her left chest. I was looking to see if Hope would alternate between the two nipples in that pair of mammae—like we always see with older cubs. She did not. Hopefully we will learn at what stage that alternating behavior begins. There is always more to learn.
Thank you all once again for you overwhelming support for our work.
—Sue Mansfield, Biologist, North American Bear Center