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A Memorable Stream and Tree, Bear Educators Needed - UPDATE January 10, 2020
10 January 2020
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Revisiting memorable places with my sister Joyce in Michigan, one of the places was Mill Creek that looks much the same as when I was a teenager. Mill Creek
Mill Creek
I remembered my many days slowly moving up the stream crouched low to avoid detection as I held my casting rod low to the water making short casts to likely riffles for brown trout. Eventually, my fascination with the stream and trout became a desire to see how they lived. Watching them from a high bank wearing Polaroid glasses or underwater wearing a face mask, I watched them forage and, upon detection of me, disappear under a bank or rock. On this trip, I noticed that the oak leaves that covered the ground had rounded lobes making them members of the white oak group that produce the black bear?s favorite acorns. Oak leaves
Oak leaves
Oak leaves of the less favored red/black oak group have pointed lobes. I had grown up exploring favorable bear habitat that had no bears.
Another place we visited was where several of us boys played tree tag, trying to mimic Tarzan until I miscalculated a jump. A branch I leaped from was too springy and I didn?t quite make it to the branch in the next tree. Catching it with only one hand, I couldn?t hold my grip as my body swung under it and up. The last thing I remember is seeing the branch disappearing up toward the sky as I fell. The next memory is my buddies asking me if I remembered where I lived as we walked into view on my house. I was in the hospital for several days with a concussion. No, it does not explain anything about my behavior today. When I visited the tree a few days ago, all that was left was the stump cut off at ground level (picture to the left). A local told me the trees were cut down two years ago because they were old and diseased.Tree stump
Tree stump
People asked if the picture in the January 4 update of "Lynn, Donna, and Mama" was of my birth mother or my mother who raised me. That photo was taken about 1980 with my adoptive mother 3 years before she died at 80, a year after Donna and I got married.
On another topic, Bear Educators are needed for 2020.
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2019 Bear Interns
2019 Bear Interns
Thank you for all you do.
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center
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Topic: Jewel and her cubs (Read 1774562 times)