Education, Female 401 and Den Cams - UPDATE January 12, 2016
Female 401 in 1989 (Cover of The Great American Bear)
Female 401 in 1989
Meeting the wonderful students at the Bear Center was great. Their enthusiasm in our Q&A session showed how eager they are to learn. They are spending their winter break taking advantage of opportunities to learn. They are the cream of the crop. A member of last year?s group became an excellent intern at the Bear Center this past summer. Our intern program last summer was so successful that we are expanding it for this coming summer. This past summer, interns and Bear Educators (Lily Fan volunteers) made visitors? experiences so good that I often was stopped on the street by people who wanted to say how wonderful their time was at the Bear Center with such great people answering their questions, leading behind-the-scenes tours, doing worldwide podcasts, working with the bears, and introducing them to new experiences. Many in the group of 32 last night enthusiastically said they would be applying for the 6 intern positions for 2016.
The Q&A session was lively. Among other things, they asked how I got started as a bear biologist and how I was first able to gain a bear?s trust and walk with it. That brought back memories of Female 401, the first bear we walked with?another candidate for the upper wall. She is pictured here from 1986, our first big year of data collection. That year, Female 401 provided the most detailed information ever gathered on a wild bear. The data was used as a mainstay in the development of the 54-page peer-reviewed booklet ?Habitat suitability index models: black bear, Upper Great Lakes Region.? (Rogers, L. L., and Arthur W. Allen. 1987. National Ecology Center, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Biological Report 82(10.144)). Clicking on the title brings up the entire text. Appropriately, she is the bear on the cover of ?The Great American Bear? (1990).
We have gone on to get even more detailed data, of course, and are now in the process of analyzing the data with the help of professors, grad students, and Lily Fan volunteers.
Mention of Female 401 brings back wonderful memories of this good bear and the scientific breakthroughs she pioneered. With her, we began developing computer programs for recording a bear?s every action in a 24-hour period. That?s a longer story, but the picture here shows the waterproof field-computer in use. In that picture from 1989, the mother bear (Terri) is reacting with anxiety to the photographer while paying little or no attention to the omnipresent but inconsequential researcher in her midst. The cubs are Mary and Gerry.
Lynn kneeling among bears recording data
Lynn kneeling among bears recording data
One of the talks I?ll be giving at the International Bear Conference in Anchorage June 12-16 is on viewing black bears for research. It will be a follow-up on an early paper describing the methods (Rogers, L. L., and G. W. Wilker. 1990. How to obtain behavioral and ecological information from free-ranging, researcher-habituated black bears. Bear Research and Management 8:321-328.) Clicking on the title brings up the entire paper.
I?m going to send in the Den Cam Permit application again tomorrow. However, I know they received my earlier submission by email November 5 and by snail mail November 6. I sent copies to many people from the Governor and his Chief of Staff on down to the Commissioner and members of his staff. Although the court said I could use Den Cams, I immediately got a warning from the DNR through the Attorney General?s office saying that they would strictly enforce a regulation prohibiting disturbance of a den between November 1 and April 1, which would prohibit visiting Den Cams as they needed maintenance. I wanted to avoid trouble. I wanted to work with the DNR. I asked that they grant the permit, get behind it, and take pride in what can result from working together. In the past, when questioned why they were prohibiting me from using a Den Cam, the DNR once gave the excuse that I had not applied for a special permit to do that. Now I did. I also wondered why they would very strictly apply the law against disturbing a den against me but would issue a press release asking hunters to check out and report any dens they find during deer hunting season this past fall. I also wondered why DNR official Lou Cornicelli told us on November 6, 2012 that we no longer had to report every visit to dens because most of our visits weren?t considered a disturbance, but the DNR took a different view when they wanted to use the law to prevent us from using Den Cams after the court said we could. I hoped to circumvent all the problems and work with the DNR on the Den Cams. It?s looking bleak. If they grant the permit, we can still do it?possibly in time to record Jewel giving birth and certainly by the time the cubs open their eyes and become active. There is still much to learn, and the data would immediately be incorporated into the paper we are writing on play development for the International Bear Conference in June.
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 2381596 times)