Holding Our Breath - UPDATE August 31, 2022
A yearling from August 2020
As tomorrow approaches, we are holding our breath. Scats are mainly chokecherries, and bears want variety. Hazelnuts would be a favorite but the hazelworm outbreak has made them scarce. Hungry mothers with cubs that were missing most of the summer are showing up to the feeding stations—18 mothers with 45 cubs in the last couple weeks. These include two non-clan mothers (Cinna and Winnie) and two we are still trying to ID. The full 18 are Colleen (19 years old), Bow (16), Lily (15), Jewel (13), Star (13), Wendy (11), Vanna (10), Pixie (7), Sidney (7), Carolyn (5), Lyla (5), Maureen (5), Winnie (5), Cinna (4), Stella (4), and Katrina (3), plus the two unknowns that have 3 and 2 cubs.
Stinkhorn Mushroom
Stinkhorn Mushroom
Stella’s male cub starts the clan’s seventh generation with his ancestors being Shadow, Blackheart, Donna, Shannon, Summer, Sadie, and Stella. I suspect we will find a S-name for him, too.
A nice thing at the end of the recent Bear Field Course was that my wife Donna discovered that one of the participants (Sego Jackson) shared her interests in mushrooms and pollinating. Together, they looked for mushrooms and saw Donna’s pollinator garden at the Bear Center, but the big mushroom find was only a step out the Bear Center door. There grew a rare mushroom that neither of them had ever seen. Sego looked it up. It was a type of stinkhorn mushroom. I got to see it, too, because they needed someone to snap the mushroom of the moment. With the courses over for the year, I’m looking forward to more good times in 2023.
Thank you for all you do,
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center