A day much like yesterday
May 19, 2010 – 8:17 PM CDT
Lily and Hope stayed in one of their usual lakeshore bedding areas and covered an area only 280 feet long all day.
June was a bit more active, but now she’s with Big Harry—the same male as 2 years ago—she doesn’t need to travel far and wide in search of a mate. The couple remained in an area only a half mile long all day, accompanied for several hours by a BBC cameraman who was mostly ignored as he filmed their courtship for the next documentary.
Braveheart and One-eyed Jack stayed within a square mile. We met up with them today to change Braveheart’s GPS unit and take heart rates. Braveheart’s was 72 and One-eyed Jack’s was 76 (see picture of Lynn taking Jack’s heart rate).
Cal was the biggest traveler, of course, as he continued his explorations in search of a mating range. Overnight he spent several hours resting in one of the expanses of bog that part of the state is famous for. In the last 24 hours, he meandered SW and SE to end up 6.6 miles farther south and 0.9 miles west of big divided Highway 53. He rested from 3:30 PM to 6:40 PM and is now heading north again as of this writing (7:22 PM).
It is of interest that this bear that allows us to change his radio-collar and GPS unit is studiously avoiding people, residences, and farmland. As we mentioned a couple days ago, it took us over an hour of playing hide and seek in the woods with him while calling to him for him to finally believe it was us and let us change his GPS unit. The mind of the black bear is more complicated and discerning than most people assume. They are not the automatons implied by the terms ‘food conditioned’ and ‘habituated.’ Until the last couple days, he did most of his traveling during darkness. Now he is more active during the day. Traveling and resting like he is, we don’t know how much he’s eating. We’re looking forward to him returning to his birth area, if he does, and getting a weight on him after this trip.
We are following the controversy over Laurel the bear who bit someone’s foot and is in danger of being euthanized. We don’t have enough information on her history, her relationship to people, and what kind of bite it was to know her motive. We can imagine several scenarios from benign to worse, all fitting the sparse facts. We haven’t gotten any calls from officials or the person bitten, trying to understand the behavior. Bites can be playful, can test the consistency of something they are curious about, can be a precisely controlled form of communication, can express frustration, or can be an attack. One bite is obviously not an attack. Some bears are curious about shoes and feet. Young bears that are prone to bite can outgrow the habit. Older bears are less likely to bite.
That’s one reason we feel perfectly safe with old 450-pound One-eyed Jack, even getting between him and his 275-pound 8-year-old mate and lifting his lip to see what condition his teeth are in. Contrary to popular opinion, once we gain the trust of older bears, which can be difficult, we find some of the most confident, mellow personalities, giving us access to intimate observations of wild behavior we never thought possible. Now, during mating season, we are thankful for a handful of trusting huge males that let us observe them with their trusting mates and record the patience of the males, the developing relationships of the couples, and the overall gentleness of their courtship. This evening we posted a video at http://www.bear.org/website/lily-a-hope/den-cam-video-clips.html of courtship behavior between June and Big Harry.
Thank you once again for your contributions.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, North American Bear Center