A most encouraging day
June 4, 2010 – 9:40 PM CDT
Seeing little Hope up the tree at the feeding site this morning was a huge relief. And seeing her sleeping at the same tree this evening was confirmation. The plan is working. Our goal, of course, is to give little Hope a helping hand until natural food becomes more abundant and she can make it on her own. It won’t take much on our part the way berries are coming along. Strawberries are ripe. Blueberries, cherries, and juneberries—enlarging rapidly with the rain and warmth—only need to ripen. It looks like a reasonable year for bear food is developing. We’re even seeing some little hazelnuts coming on.
Hope is still vulnerable. She’s at the age of sleeping the deep sleep on an infant. That’s where Lily’s keen senses are supposed to come in. Hopefully, Hope will usually sleep high in a tree.
Should we put Hope in captivity to make her totally safe? That would ruin her life. Mentally and physically, bears are made to live wild and free. With all their wild instincts stifled by the confines of a pen, that is not what they evolved to be. Even the best captive enclosure, like the North American Bear Center’s world class facility with all its forest, waterfalls, wild food, and pond is a distant second to life in the wild. The Bear Center is not an option for Hope because it has all the bears it should have and Hope showed us today she is doing fine.
The only humane option is to leave little Hope wild and free. She is eating and drinking, playing and sleeping, and looking much better than we dared hope for. Today was most encouraging.
Lily is fine, too. Her milk is about gone. Sue had a hard time finding a breast today. They are no longer swollen with milk. The lumps from the clogged milk ducts are disappearing without any mastitis. We think this young mother will do better the next time around, which could be next year.
We’re looking forward to what Hope and Lily will show us throughout this year. Knowing the details of their lives is unprecedented, and it opens possibilities for a better understanding of their behavior, including the split. We’ll be watching for signs of estrus, documenting Lily’s liaisons with males, and recording her interactions, if any, with Hope. At this moment, Lily is roaming widely like the other non-lactating adult females.
By following the course we’re taking, we’re turning a near tragedy into a learning experience. We’ll all continue to learn together. Meanwhile, we’ll wait and hope together as the story takes its twists and turns, but so far, it couldn’t be going better considering the circumstances.
Lily and Hope are doing a tremendous amount for bears. They are undoubtedly doing more to raise world awareness about bears than any research bears ever have. Benefits extend from the black bears that live among us to the endangered bears of other countries. The more people learn about bears, the more willing they become to coexist with them. People will not coexist with animals they fear. Lily and Hope are showing the world what black bears are really like—and that is anything but the scary animals shown on sensationalized TV programs, shown in hunting magazines, and in taxidermy. For once, people are tuned in to real bears. People cannot do any better than learning directly from the bears themselves. And it would hard to find better teachers than Lily and Hope.
We received another report of a Juliet sighting. It came while Sue was replenishing Hope's feeding stations and Lynn was replacing June's GPS unit. Hopefully next time she's sighted we'll be able to react and get her re-collared.
Thank you again for your contributions and everything you did to help things turn out this well.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, North American Bear Center