HoneyOne of the few things left that we can get out of the reduced number of radio-collared bears is what is happening to June’s territory following her death last fall.
3-year-old Faith had settled just south of June’s territory in an area with no resident people and very few visitors. We wondered if she would move north to fill part of the vacancy June left. Not so far. Instead, 7-year-old Lily has occupied that area and she may be keeping Faith from moving north.
This year, 3-year-old Aster is confining herself to a portion of June’s old territory roughly 2.5 by 1.5 miles that she’s had mostly to herself. Territorial claims are not settled yet, though, because today Lily was in the core of Aster’s area less than a hundred yards from Aster’s den of this past winter. Will Lily realize the area is occupied and move on? Will Aster retreat from the area Lily uses, if Lily stays? That’s the advantage of GPS data. We can see in real time what is happening and have over a hundred locations a day from which to judge interactions. So different from the old days when we’d be lucky to get one telemetry location per day. We saw territorial shifts even then, but not in the detail we can report now.
Holly5-year-old Jewel lives immediately northeast of Aster and seems to respect Aster’s space even though Aster is injured, younger, and smaller. Each day is another chapter. We wish we had a collar on Jewel’s 2-year-old daughter Fern but have not had an opportunity to give her one.
Juliet’s territory is not adjacent to June’s old territory or any other living clan bear. Permit restrictions and deaths of bears (Sharon, Shirley, Jo, Victoria) ended most opportunities for study in that area. To the north of June’s territory, permit restrictions ended studies of Braveheart and her daughters Oliana and Jani. To the east of June’s territory, permit restrictions prevented us from re-collaring 14-year-old Donna and her yearlings. Donna’s sister Dot (14) who held the territory to the east and north of Donna’s was killed this past fall. 5-year-old Star holds the territory to the north of Donna’s and west of Dot’s and is still radio-collared but her territory is over 2 miles away from June’s clan.
Male Ruby-throated HummingbirdThe permit restrictions of the last 3 years have prevented us from radio-collaring young females to continue studies of land tenure using modern GPS methods that give so much more detail than anything we’ve been able to do in the past. The value of females with land tenure histories was one of the reasons we asked for protection of radio-collared bears. Even the 5.5% rate of hunting loss has created major setbacks, but that has been compounded by restrictions on placing radio-collars on daughters of long-studied bears and by the recent jump to a 30% hunting loss. Central to that was the loss of 12-year-old June who had provided more data on bear life than any bear ever has. We hope the appeal allows us to radio-collar as we did before the restrictions began in 2012. Meanwhile, we will be analyzing the over quarter million GPS locations we’ve accumulated under less than ideal circumstances.
Male Ruby-throated HummingbirdWhat happened to Holly yesterday? Her behavior today sheds new light on yesterday. We suspect Lucky tried to play with her and played too rough. Holly’s refuge spot where deadfalls criss-cross is within reach of Lucky, and his tracks are there. We suspect Holly’s decision to return to her pen at 4:30 PM yesterday was to escape Lucky. Today, she refused to leave the pen and is still there now. Her general demeanor has changed. She lacks confidence and is agitated. When it was gentle Ted’s turn to be out and Lucky was confined in the pen next to Holly, Holly bluff-charged him, something we’ve never seen her do toward him. Something happened yesterday between 2 PM and 4:30 PM that changed their relationship. Will this also make Holly more reticent toward Ted? She is even less confident and trusting around staff members. We’ll see if she will come out of her pen tomorrow. If so, we hope she explores and finds better refuge trees. She probably has not yet found the big white pine Lucky used as a cub.
The fifth and last in the Holly video series is posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LipG_4ktpWY.
Hummingbirds are putting on a show here at WRI. According to one author, they “have possibly the most intensely iridescent feathers known in birds.” The throat patch of males, called the “gorget” from the French word for throat “gorge,” flashes brilliant red at some angles but is dark and dull in others.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center
All photos taken today unless otherwise noted.