Lily & Hope, Facebook, Classrooms
July 16, 2010 – 8:16 PM CDT
Lily and Hope are behaving ever more like a family. As the video from today shows, Lily is pulling down cherry trees, and Hope is diving in to help eat them. Lily is opening logs, and Hope is diving in to eat ant pupae. When Lily tries to play with Hope at inopportune times, we have never seen a feistier cub. Hope lets mom know to lay off when a hungry cub is trying to eat. But she won’t let Lily out of her sight. The video is online at http://www.bear.org/website/lily-a-hope/den-cam-video-clips.html.
Handsome Shylow (Braveheart’s brother) stopped by briefly today. We’ve seen him off and on the last few days after an absence of 11 months. He is readily identifiable with the distinctive bite out of his ear. He knows us and would readily let us radio-collar him, as we did when he was younger, but now at 8 years of age his neck is bigger than his head. Males with big necks should not be radio-collared, especially in fall when they are heading into hibernation. Tight collars can prevent bears from hibernating in the normal position. Unfortunately, without a radio-collar we have no idea where he disappears to for up to 11 months. From what we’ve learned from other bears, it could be up to 126 miles away.
The Facebook page is having growing pains, and we’ve been listening to your viewpoints. Some say the administrators delete too many posts and some say the opposite. Hitting the middle ground is difficult. Guidelines are needed. The administrators are trying to come up with guidelines like others on public message boards but revised to fit our situation. With passions so strong for the bears, disagreements are inevitable. We hope good guidelines will make good discussions. We are supportive of the administrators and their attempts to create workable guidelines. At the same time, they and we are exploring other options to make things even better. It’s hard to know exactly what to do except to keep trying. This is all so new for all of us.
On another note, we’re looking for a volunteer to gather input from teachers and assemble their comments. When a volunteer is in place, we’re hoping teachers will share their thoughts on how the North American Bear Center can improve its outreach to classrooms across America. We also hope to get some idea how many classrooms are following Lily and Hope and the updates.
Thank you again for all you do to further our research and education efforts. The treats you are sending for the Bear Center staff each week make all of us feel well cared for. The fresh nuts you are sending through Nuts Online are extremely helpful in taking heart rates, doing examinations, changing radio-collars, and changing GPS units every few days. The new combination of GPS data sent to Google Earth on our computer together with direct observation as needed is providing better data than ever. Thank you again. You know all you are doing to support the research and further our educational efforts.
We are looking forward to the Lilypad Picnic and the chance to meet and thank as many of you as possible.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center