Travelin’ Bears
Travelin’ Bears
May 14, 2010 – 10:07 PM
Bears were on the go today. Big time. Except Lily and Hope. They did their usual. Early this morning, they moved a third of a mile and then spent the rest of the day in an area less than a hundred yards—maybe less than a hundred feet. Then about 8:30 this evening, they moved 250 yards to a new place.
What a contrast with the others. June put on over 6.5 miles cruising her territory. We don’t know if she is with a male or not.
Braveheart put on at least 8 miles putting One-eyed Jack through his paces keeping up with her. Her GPS stopped working once again, so we intercepted them to replace it. What a sweetheart Jack is. He is big (close to 463 pounds) but gentle and trustworthy. We were surprised to see Braveheart making the quavering upset sound when he came too close, so we’re confused as to whether they are copulating yet. Jack made the mistake of letting Braveheart out of his sight while he went to a lakeshore for a drink. She ambled away on a woods road. Jack returned to her last spot and found her missing. The video shows him sniffing the ground carefully and then heading off on her scent trail. With all the scent she had left around the area in the previous 15 minutes, we don’t know how he picked up the freshest scent and followed it away like it was an everyday thing. The video posted to http://www.bear.org/website/lily-a-hope/den-cam-video-clips.html shows him doing just that.
We radio-located Jo today – and even caught sight of her. She’s traveled so far recently that we hadn’t been able to locate her signal for several days. She is one of the calmest, most trusting bears once she identifies us. But today, she didn’t believe “It’s me, bear” when we tried to track down to replace her GPS unit. We came up over a hill and saw her 108 yards away down a power corridor. She caught sight of us and ran. We tracked her radio-signal for a couple hundred yards saying, “It’s me, bear.” The signal just faded away as she cleared out of the area. We don’t know how far she’s traveled lately because her GPS unit failed.
The champion traveler is Cal. He has moved 73 miles from his den in Canada to where he is right now, just 31 miles from the Duluth Airport and headed that way.
Thank you once again for your contributions.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, North American Bear Center