Faith on Hope - July 12, 2011While driving to work with the temperature at 23° below zero, I hoped Jewel would wait until January 22nd to give birth. That’s the morning she gave birth to Fern and Herbie in 2012 when temperatures were rising from 6° below zero to 20° above zero http://www.bearstudy.org/website/updates/daily-updates/1517-cubs-born-at-722-and-840-am-.html . The forecast for this year is for temperatures to remain above zero day and night from January 21 through at least January 26 with the high on January 22 being 18°F. Temperatures for the 4 days after that are as high as 29°F to give the cubs a comfortable start.
Another candidate for the upper wall in the Bear Center is this picture of Faith initiating play with big sister Hope. Before Faith and Jason were born, no one knew what mixed-age litters did. Did the mother allow the yearling to interact with the newborn cubs? Did she allow the yearling to nurse along with them? We saw that Hope was actually nursing when the new litter was born. (http://www.bearstudy.org/website/updates/daily-updates/1167-the-cubs-are-born-.html) We saw the cubs bond with Hope—perhaps more closely than with mother Lily who nursed them. We saw them all share Lily’s milk. We wish the story could have continued beyond September 16, 2011, a date we will always remember.
Following up on your questions about Tim Treadwell and Amie Huguenard being killed by a brown bear on October 5, 2003, the first such killing in the history of Katmai National Park, a lot of information is in these three pieces by John Rogers (no relation) at http://www.katmaibears.com/timothytreadwell.htm and in this piece at http://www.yellowstone-bearman.com/Tim_Treadwell.html. I can say that in my 11 trips to that area (1996-2006), I never felt the least bit threatened. From my talks with Tim, he never had a problem either. He loved and respected the bears he knew. The killer may not have been a bear he knew, given that big bears can take food away from smaller bears and that a nearby bear-viewing camp had seen many new bears coming from the interior in that year that they reported to be a poor salmon run. I wish Animal Planet had followed through on the idea to have me host the program about his life and death. Instead, the final story became the movie “Grizzly Man,” which I thought sold Timothy short.
Thank you for all you do.
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center