A visit from Grandma?
July 10, 2010 – 9:31 PM CDT
This afternoon we quickly drove out to Hope’s area because Grandma June was there and we wondered what might happen. Of course, we talked about how cool it would be if Grandma adopted little Hope, but we knew that was highly unlikely. June’s GPS locations showed her to be foraging slowly along a gravel road lined with raspberries. Driving down the road, we didn’t see her and assumed she retreated into cover as we have seen other bears do. Hope was 75 yards into the forest. We wanted to record whatever happened. False alarm. Over the next hour, June drifted directly away from Hope.
We then checked on Hope. By the time we crashed through dense underbrush saying “It’s me, bear,” she was a short way up a tree a few feet from a freshly opened log. The log was soft and very rotted. When she came down, we put a few nuts in crevices in the log to see if she indeed could tear it apart. She did. She hooked her claws into it and threw her weight back. She tore off pieces and dug into the softer interior wood, using her teeth as needed like big bears do. As we watched in amazement, we also noticed again how black she is becoming. More and more black guard hairs are protruding through her brownish cub fur, which will soon be shed.
Speaking of “shed,” the shed you sponsored is done and ready to be painted. A staff member said, “It looks good, too. It will be so good to get the bear food out of the office and into the shed!” The staff will quickly take advantage of the office space to make room for the two summer interns and the Professor of Education who is here on sabbatical for a year.
On another note of thank you, the nuts you’ve been sending have been a godsend. We’ve never had such fresh pecans and hazelnuts to coax bears into letting us adjust their radio-collars and change their GPS batteries (which we have to do every 10 days). The bears strongly prefer your nuts over anything else we can offer. You’ve made our job easier than ever, and little Hope loves them.
Thank you for how you are stepping up to the plate with the voting. With 2 days to go, the suspense is almost over in the Chase Community Giving contest. You have put the Bear Center solidly in the top 5 with 13,025 votes as of this minute. That’s 4,012 votes ahead of 6th place. The way you are finding votes, we believe you will keep us in the top 5 to win $100,000.
At the same time, you have moved the Wildlife Research Institute up to 11th place with 6,911 votes, only 5,071 votes out of the top 5. That sounds like an impossible number of votes to find in only 2 days, but if there were some way to notify all 105,376 Lily fans, it could happen.
Everything seems to be going well.
To vote for the North American Bear Center and keep it in the top 5 the next two days, click here. http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/411838192-north-american-bear-center
To vote for the Wildlife Research Institute and try to move it into the top 5 in the next two days, click here. http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/237320150-wildlife-research-institute
For your other votes (you can vote for up to 20 organizations), here are some bear organizations.
Endangered Asian Bears:
In addition, some of the people who have voted for the NABC and the WRI have organizations in the running.
Thank you for all you are doing at this critical time.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center