Bears, Filming, and Zazzle store
April 5, 2010 – 7:24 PM CDT
Today, we relied mainly on remote methods to determine bear activities. Telemetry signals showed Lily and Hope are likely bedded near the same white pine. We did not walk in on her – perhaps tomorrow. This is an older pic but we thought you might appreciate it.
When we visited Lily’s mother June on April 1, we changed her collar to one with an attached GPS transmitter. We can now monitor her movements from our computers at the field station where locations show up on aerial photos in Google Earth. According to today’s GPS locations, June and her yearlings continued to forage in an alder swamp about 200 yards from their den. Late in the day they explored some of the upland areas nearby, then returned to the swamp to bed for the night.
We visited Juliet’s den and found her still inside with her 3 small cubs. When Juliet came out to greet us, the 3 cubs played quietly with each other in the den—quite unlike the screaming we saw with Hope when Lily left the den!
Gordon Buchanan, a BBC cameraman and TV presenter, has joined the BBC film team and the research team. Today was the first day of Gordon’s journey to understand bears so he can walk with them and contribute data to the project. The 3 documentaries will follow his feelings and apprehensions as he confronts his misconceptions with information provided by the bears and the research team.
Lily has many creative and generous fans. Some have donated artwork for sale in the NABC Gift Shop; others have sold their crafts and donated a portion of the proceeds to the NABC; still others have sent artwork for use on items to sell. We’ve decided to do something a bit different with the donated artwork. We’ve opened the Lily’s Hope online store at Zazzle with proceeds going to the Wildlife Research Institute to help with the cost of research materials such as radio-collars, GPS units, video cameras, remote tracking and recording devices, etc. The shop can be accessed from the front page of the Wildlife Research Institute website at http://www.bearstudy.org or directly at http://www.zazzle.com/lilyshope. We thank Rebecca Hamilton for her work to set this up. If you would like to contribute artwork for consideration, please email
Thank you for all you are doing to help bears. Thank you for your contributions towards reducing the debt and towards the pocket video cameras that arrived as this was being written! Now to figure out how to use them….
Thank you for all your good comments about the 'Bearwalker' program last night. It was fun to watch the comments roll in during each commercial break! We hope the program makes a difference for bears.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, North American Bear Center