Whiteheart has left her den after letting thousands of people glimpse the hidden world of bear hibernation this past winter.  For the first time, it was possible to watch a wild, hibernating black bear 24 hours a day without approaching the bear and possibly disturbing it.  In fact, people all over the world watched the bear hibernating in the darkness of the den in the woods near Ely, MN, through the new technologies of the internet and infrared lighting.

To the bear, the den was in natural darkness, but people could see because infrared light from the lipstick-sized camera in the den was converted to visible lighting by the camera and was transmitted to the Discovery Channel head-quarters in Maryland. 

The bearcam on www.discovery.com received over a million hits and was one of the most popular features on the elaborate site.  It gave the public the opportunity to become interested in how bears really live.  For more information, discovery.com linked their site to the North American Bear Center web site at www.bear.org.  The opportunity to do this arose when Whiteheart made her den just 125 yards from a backwoods cabin that had electricity and a telephone. 

The idea came from Discovery Channel TV producer Doug Hajicek who saw an Aqua-Vu underwater camera in my living room and said, "This should be in a bear den."  He worked with the manufacturer, Nature Vision, Inc, of Baxter, Minnesota, to adapt the underwater camera to the den and connect it to the cabin by cable.  The cabin owners, educators themselves, cooperated magnificently and allowed a dedicated phone line to be installed to carry the image to the Internet server.

Whiteheart is one of the new research bears that is part of a new study that relies on trust instead of capture and drugs.  Wild black bears in the Superior National Forest allow trusted researchers to place radio-collars on them and observe them as they go about the business of making a living off the land and in some cases raising cubs.  Whiteheart arrived at her chosen den location on September 13, 1999, and excavated her den burrow by September 24.  For the next couple weeks she emerged periodically to rake bedding into it from a 1200 square foot area of the forest floor. 

When we were certain that Whiteheart had settled down for the winter, we put the camera and a microphone in place in the den entrance and began getting a different picture of hibernation.  I had thought hibernation was a calm state to conserve energy.  And in some cases it is.  I have seen skinny bears trying to stretch their meager fat through the six or seven months of a northern Minnesota winter.  These bears were hibernating so deeply that I could shovel snow off their backs or lay my head on their chest to try to hear a heartbeat without an immediate response.  We once picked up an orphaned yearling and found that it initially had no power in its legs.  These bears slow down their breathing to about 1.3 breaths per minute and have such slow and feeble heartbeats that I have been unable to hear the beats even with my ear to the chest.  To survive the winter, skinny bears give up their ability for immediate response to danger and skinny females are unable to produce cubs.

At the other end of the spectrum are very well fed bears.  Well-fed females maintain a higher metabolism in hibernation and a high enough blood oxygen to maintain fetuses full term.  They are alert to danger and attend to every cry of their newborn cubs.  They greet humans intruding at the bear entrance with a ferocious looking lunge.  Their hearts are audible from outside the den on a calm winter day.  Whiteheart was somewhere between these extremes.  For the first half of winter, until mid-January, she was restless, tossing and turning and rearranging her bedding.  Internet viewers downloaded many pictures of her changing position and got some good portraits of her head in front of the camera with eyes open. 

During the first two weeks of January, she frequently sat up and licked her genitals like dogs do when they are about to give birth. The peak time for birthing by black bears is mid-January.  At three years of age, Whiteheart was younger than most bears are when they begin producing cubs.  But since she had been well fed and was big for her age, we thought there was a chance she was carrying enough fat to maintain a high enough blood oxygen level to produce living cubs.  I believe her discomfort and behavior in early January was because she was carrying fetuses that nearly reached full term.  I believe she produced stillborn cubs and ate them like my friend Steve Searles observed when he videotaped a female in a den in California.  That bear similarly was restless and licked her genitals before the birth.

After mid-January, Whiteheart settled down to a calm sleep.  Instead of breathing four or five times a minute like she did earlier, she took two or three long luxurious breaths per minute and seldom changed position. It was a mild winter and spring came early.  In March when the snow is normally two feet deep, the little snow that was present disappeared.  Whiteheart continued her calm sleep. On March 31, I got a flurry of e-mails.  Whiteheart was suddenly active-very active.  For the first time, she disturbed the camera.  I visited the den the next day to readjust the camera and saw tracks showing that she had ventured eight feet outside and immediately reentered the den.  The den monitor showed her to be sleeping so calmly that she only briefly lifted her head as I approached saying "Don't worry Whiteheart, it's just me, don't worry."  A pile of feces lay in the den entrance, but I mistakenly didn't pick it up for fear of disturbing her.  I planned to pick it up after she left and go through to find tiny claws to confirm or reject the idea of her eating stillborn cubs.  But on one of her several emergences over the next nine days, she raked the bedding out of her den, covering and scattering the feces.  A cold snap froze the wet pile. 

She left the den for the last time on April 9 and raked a bed of leaves and club moss 70 feet away.  She made several more beds within a hundred yards of the den over the next week or more.  When anyone approached, she slipped away into the underbrush unseen and unheard, revealed only by the radio signals from her collar.  I wondered how well she would remember me.  I approached calling out to her.  Her signal remained strong.  I glimpsed her dark form through the dense underbrush and lay down and waited. I saw her ears pointed toward me.  I talked to her. She took a few steps, stopped to listen some more, and confidently came to me.  Our bond of trust was not broken by hibernation.

Sometime between April 14 and 19, she left the area, leaving behind her radio-collar.  I carry it with me in the woods, hoping to see her and slip it on her again.  The pile of leaves outside her den has now thawed, and I have to stop putting off the job of raking through them to find bits of feces and possibly the claws of Whiteheart's cubs.