Pine siskinTomorrow we will take Juliet’s broken hard drive to a company that we hope can retrieve the Den Cam footage. When we get it back we’ll be doubling up on video each day until we catch up from these past down days.
In the meantime, the raw archives are here: http://www.bearstudy.org/website/research/2014-juliet-archives.html
Watching this beautiful 2-minute video of June eating Wild Calla on April 28, 2009, I can’t help but marvel at what we’ve seen. To be able to see a wild bear do her wild thing and ignore the observer was a dream back in the 1970’s when I was tranquilizing and didn’t think observations like this were possible. In the 1980’s, we discovered it was possible but in those days didn’t touch bears other than captive-raised Gerry and didn’t have the trust we developed in the current study. It was in this study, especially with June, that we achieved the highest level of trust. The hundreds of hours of video tell the story and preserve the details in high-resolution clarity. http://youtu.be/b67zxhnScJc
In this video, I believe she is eating the Wild Calla roots, which is where nutrients reside in the winter dormant phase. They also eat Coralroot Orchid roots in spring.
The temperature when June was wading in to eat was probably near the high of 48°F for that day.
It’s even warmer (61°F) today on this very unseasonably warm day—29° degrees warmer than last year on this date. No wonder Honey is on the move today and Ted is out of his den again. Lucky has northern Wisconsin genes and is not fazed by the warm weather. Holly’s wrecked her camera, but we assume she is in her den.
A Nature Note: a week ago a flock of about 200 common redpolls (including one Hoary Redpoll) and a few dozen Pine Siskins descended on the WRI. We haven’t seen one Redpoll for several days now, and reports across the area are that they and the Pine Grosbeaks that wintered here are heading back north already. Pine Siskins remain. These northern counterparts of Goldfinches are plainer and tamer than Goldfinches. I remember when a flock of Siskins landed on me when I covered my hat and jacket shoulders with sunflower seed parts.
With spring on the way, we very much need volunteer pond chat moderators. Fans around the world will be checking out the pond cam to watch Ted, Honey, Lucky, and Holly, and they will be watching the daily on-cam enrichment programs and the weekly LIVE FROM THE NABC broadcasts. We need dedicated volunteers to join our amazing pond chat moderator team to cover especially the following shifts:
8-10:30 am and 4-5 pm daily; 7-8 pm Mon - Thursday; 5-7 pm Sunday.
Check out the position description at www.bear.org/website/volunteer.html and fill out a volunteer application on the same page. If you have submitted an application previously, just e-mail
On the Bear Feeding Bill, some have asked to see it in its entirety. Here’s the link. The Bear Feeding part is Section 20.
I asked our attorney about the public safety claims the DNR constantly makes about the bear-feeding. He sent some quotes from the court records. The court determined that the DNR’s “nuisance bear complaints are incomplete, inconsistent, and in some instances, inaccurate.” The inaccurate word here refers to the DNR filing complaints in people’s names without their knowledge and words and refers to the DNR adding information to a complaint years after it was initially reported.
With regard to the value of the DNR complaint records in making a case against feeding and against my research, the court found, “As a result of substandard record-keeping, the DNR’s data is of minimal value with regard to conducting a comparative analysis of either the quantify or quality of bear related incidents or nuisance bear complaints experienced by the public in Eagles Nest Township or elsewhere in Minnesota.”
Thank you for the support you are giving in trying to have the Bear-Feeding Section struck from the above Bill.
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center