Jo's tracks - Oct 27, 2011
big snowflakes - Oct 27, 2011As dawn broke, we saw the biggest snowflakes we had ever seen. As we homed in on Ursula’s telemetry signals, the forest was turning white. Then 6-year-old Ursula gave a surprise, she and her 2 cubs are almost certainly in a den she tried out last fall. We triangulated her position from an eighth of a mile away but didn’t check closely because Ursula is not accustomed to being visited in the woods. She is calm and trusting where she expects to see us, but we have never been able to reliably approach her in the woods. Her GPS batteries have long expired, so we track her entirely by telemetry.
Jo and Victoria - Oct 27, 2011Midday, Jo and Victoria took center stage. She is 5 ½ miles from where she was 5 days ago. Her main activities are checking our possible den sites and scent-marking. She and Victoria sat focused to the southwest and finally walked off in that direction. Jo scent-marked frequently as she walked, straddling bushes, stomp-walking, and standing to rub her back, shoulders, neck, and crown on trees. Then a familiar pinnacle came into view. Shirley’s den! Jo sniffed out a bed in the snow Shirley had used earlier today. Jo started following Shirley’s tracks to the den. She was very keyed up. Little Victoria happened to be in the same direction as the den. Jo stood up with an anxious look on her face, then dropped to all fours and charged, blowing, in the direction of Victoria. False alarm. They touched noses. Jo continued toward the den as Victoria drifted off, and Jo ended up charging toward Victoria again. That time, Jo seemed to lose interest in approaching the den and moved off with Victoria. As darkness fell, the two were a mile back toward where they were 5 days ago.
den Jo checked out - Oct 27, 2011What drives bears to travel this time of year? Do they remember places where they felt safe and might like to den there? Places where there were few smells from other bears? Do they remember places where the soil is easy to dig? Do they remember potential den sites they scouted earlier in the year? We’re remembering that June dug a den on July 19 and gave birth in that den 6 months later in January. Is scent-marking their territory something that motivates them? We have seen that scent-marking by females peaks in early fall, but will the scent still be present in spring when bears are active again? Jo ate nothing today, and Victoria nibbled a few alder cones and a few small twinflower leaves—altogether less than a mouthful. We wish we could experience their world of scent and get a glimpse into their minds for better clues about what drives them.
A call for an interview today was about a deer hunter in a tree stand. A mother with cubs came by. A cub spooked and ran up a tree 3 feet from the hunter and stopped right next to the hunter. The hunter screamed at the mother bear, and she came up and bit the hunter in the leg. We talked about how rare that is, about how there have been only a handful of attacks on the ground but over a dozen people who have been bitten by mother black bears when they climbed trees to escape. We mentioned that we know of no one killed by a mother black bear, although 70 percent of the killings by grizzly bears are by mothers defending cubs. Of the 66 killings by wild black bears, only 3 have been by mothers with cubs, and there was no conclusive evidence that those 3 were actually defending the cubs. We talked about how screaming can further agitate an already agitated mother bear, how bears differ in personality, and how there are individuals who differ from the rest—like the one black bear in a million that kills someone. The interview was with the St Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch Newspaper. We’ll see what it says tomorrow.
Video of Jo and Victoria from Oct 24 is posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iDVex63dBw.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center