Daisy - August 19, 2012With the rain today, we decided not to check on Juliet to see if we should change her GPS batteries or remove the GPS unit for the winter. We radio-tracked from roads to establish locations for Faith, Aster, and Daisy to see if their locations turn out to be dens down the line. For now, we are just trying to establish dates of arrival at den sites. Aster seems to be in the same location she was on Oct 3—and may be at a den—but Faith has moved. A logging operation is going on near Faith and we wonder if that has affected her movements. Yearling Daisy, a great-granddaughter of Shadow (Shadow, RC, Bow, Daisy), is still on the peninsula where we suspect she has a den.
The PTZ (Pan Tilt Zoom) cam at the NABC pond went live today on bear.org in the drop down box under Live Cameras. It’s set on patrol mode and stops at various locations around the pond. As time permits, NABC staff can override patrol mode and focus the PTZ on a spot of interest.
The spot of interest to us today was Ted’s wooden den by the windows off to the left. He was digging his own den right through the wooden floor! Someone suggested giving him straw to satisfy his urge to arrange a den. It worked. Ted seemed contented. He seems to have selected the wooden window den as his den for this year. A problem is that construction on the new addition will start a few feet away in less than a month. Part of the construction will be trenching a septic line right past Ted’s den. There’s nothing we can do. We’ll all see how he responds.
Most of the birds foraging in front of the Pond Cam at the Bear Center these days are dark-eyed juncos. They are nicknamed Snowbirds because they often appear before snowstorms. They upheld that reputation last week when they appeared in numbers the two days before the snow. They breed across Canada and winter in the United States. Dark-eyed Juncos around here are the “slate-colored” race. Flocks of these sparrows are easy to identify when they fly up and show white outer tail feathers against plain gray bodies for males or brown bodies for females. Both sexes have white breasts and bellies.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center