Is it Cole? - April 29, 2015I think the mystery 2-year-old is Cole, but comparing him with cub pictures of Eli and Cole, both have big brown eyebrow patches. They can lose some of that as they grow, just as they can lose a lot of a big white chest patch by the time they turn into yearlings. The good long-lens photo of his face from April 29 (2015) show faint remains of the big eyebrow patches shown in the May picture in the 2014 “Black Bear Cubs of Shadow’s Clan” calendar, but his muzzle looks lighter. Just enough difference to make me unsure.
Eli - April 13, 2013He knows his way around here, checking for food where we don’t have any out yet. He is likely a member of the clan. In the dark, he had the courage to come up to me. We often see bears more confident in the dark. It fits that he is skittish whether he is Cole or Eli. We did not get to know either of them very well. Cole’s mother June hardly came to the WRI, and we barely had time to walk with June and the family in 2013 while we were immersed in the DNR struggle.
Cole - June 28, 2013For Eli, we felt like we knew him after watching him grow and chase his sister around Lily on the Den Cam, but in our quest for pure data from the Den Cam, we refrained from visiting the den in person. So Eli didn’t get to know us. That meant walking with Lily wasn’t productive in 2013 because a major activity would be her following Eli and Ellie as they moved away from us in the bushes. Or, Lily would be waiting for Eli and Ellie to come down from a tree. We might have overcome that if we’d had time to get them used to us, but we also didn’t want to bother them. We mainly visited Lily briefly to change the batteries in her GPS unit and let her give us super data on her movements via GPS.
Cole, if it is him, will trust me to an extent if I have a chance to show him I mean no harm, but today when I opened the door during daylight he ran. Now he’s back in the dark showing more trust, but any false move on my part and he runs off. Bear minds are always intriguing.
Thank you for all you do.
Lynn Rogers, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center