Checking on Lily & Hope, Wondering about Jewel
May 6, 2010 – 3:57 PM CDT
Top of our agenda today was checking on Lily. Not because we were worried about her or Hope, but because we hadn’t gotten a reading from her GPS transmitter since 8:27 PM yesterday. We thought the swim across the bay might have affected the unit and we wanted to replace it before they roamed too far. Fortunately we found them right where they had been last night, so it was an easy task.
Lily and Hope were bedded at a large white pine in a tangle of downed trees. It was difficult to get close enough to even see them, but we took a bit of video and posted it to http://www.bear.org/website/lily-a-hope/den-cam-video-clips.html. Lily was uncharacteristically nervous and blustery so we didn’t stay long.
Later, we checked the computer and found that June had suddenly moved away from the 1,000-foot diameter forest she was in much of yesterday and overnight and had passed near Lily and Hope on her way to the nether regions of her territory. Perhaps this is why Lily was nervous while we were with her—you saw in the Bearwalker program what Lily has to look out for from June!
Between 11:44 AM and 2:14 PM, June moved 2.4 miles into a roadless area. Did this mean she had left her yearlings and was putting space between her and them?
We doubly wondered about family breakup for June because we had a report from our research associate in the eastern part of the study area that 7-year-old Colleen was seen for the second time without her 3 yearlings. At first we doubted family breakup could have occurred so early for Colleen—it would be the earliest in our records. Four years ago, Braveheart broke up with her yearlings on May 10. But this is also the earliest spring on record. Could that be a factor? It’s looking more like Colleen did split from her yearlings on May 4, but we still have some doubt because her telemetry signals show she is not cruising long distances laying down scent trails like you’d expect from an estrous female. We’ll keep checking.
Colleen being seen without her yearlings left us wondering if June might have split from Jewel and Jordan, so the next order of business today was triangulating on June and Jewel’s telemetry positions to see if they were still together. Jewel doesn’t have a GPS unit on her little yearling collar, so we have to use telemetry to find her. Their signals were still together so we’re assuming June’s family unit is still intact.
It won’t be long before our favorite females will have the company of the largest males in the area and we’ll see if they pair up the same as in past years.
Thank you for your contributions. We reached another milestone at $160,000. This reduces the debt to $540,000. We know many of you have donated multiple times and appreciate it very much.
We’re still on a high here after being with the Bear Course folks the last few days. Today, it was back to regular work and catching up. We got a call from the man driving the Bearwalker DVD’s 250 miles up from Minneapolis. He’s worried about the 3-6 inches of snow forecast for tomorrow and may not bring them up until Tuesday. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that he can bring them tomorrow.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, North American Bear Center