Quiet Day

What a quiet day in the den!  Lily spent long periods with the cubs either sleeping or nursing beneath her and Hope quietly sleeping beside her.  Yes, Hope bawled to nurse a couple times but it basically came off as a quiet day.  Not that this is unusual, but with all the activity of the past week, it is a contrast.  Check the nearly identical position of Lily in the two den cam images below taken 5 1/2 hours apart.

The whine is gone.  Crossing our fingers, but since Jason installed the noise filter that Bill Powers of PixController sent, we haven’t heard it.  The test was today.  Bright sun.  No whine.  But maybe snow had covered the solar panels.   Super Jason went and checked and took this picture.  Not enough snow to prevent the whine in the old days.  We think the whine is gone.

We checked the discussion page and saw your good questions and the good answers provided by people in the know, like Randi Schwartz.

Questions included:

How good is Ontario’s Bear Wise information?  We could only open Part 1 and saw nothing to quibble about.  Ontario has become one of the best sources of black bear information.  They don’t go overboard scaring people.  On the other hand, we weren’t able to access the bear/human conflict section on the Bear Wise page, so we might want to come back to this question after we see that.

Do small den openings correspond to pregnant mothers? We haven’t noticed a pattern of pregnant mothers selecting dens with small openings.  Last year, Lily’s entrance was fairly big, and some pregnant mothers den out in the open on the ground surface.

Will Lily’s den flood with all this snow? That is a big concern this winter.  The den is in a lowland with a lot of high ground around it.  We do expect flooding.  Seeing what they do to survive will be one of the learning experiences.  About April first is when melting usually exceeds snowfall, and there is a lot to melt.  We expect flooding this early April.  Will the cubs climb onto Lily’s back in the den as we saw in Donna’s den a couple years back?  Will they be able to walk well enough by then to follow her out to high ground, or will she have to carry them in her mouth as we saw Terri do a couple decades back when her den flooded?  Will the cubs get soaked and will Lily lick them dry as June did to Lily when their den temporarily flooded in March 2007?  We’re glad we have the pan/tilt/zoom camera to see some of that.  We’ll also try to get as much as we can on video.

Why does Honey come out in the snow? As others rightly said, her ancestry might be from a part of the country where bears come out and check for food.  As someone also said, she is very fat and has energy to burn, so she doesn’t have to drop into such a deep metabolic state as skinny bears do.

In the old days when we approached dens to tranquilize and weigh bears to see how they fared under different food conditions, we knew as soon as we got to a den whether the bear was skinny or fat.  You can’t tell by looking at them.  They all have thick fur.  But the fat bears wake up easily and were often watching to see what was coming.  If fat bears were sleeping, we could hear the strong heartbeat on quiet days.  On the other hand, skinny bears that came through a summer of scarce food due to a drought or late frost were slow to wake up, and we couldn’t hear their heartbeats.  Shoveling snow off the back of an old, skinny bear didn’t wake her up.

Another bear was sleeping so soundly after such a year, that she didn’t wake up when the snow was shoveled away from her entrance and a tranquilizer injected into her shoulder.  The tranquilizer takes a few minutes to take effect, so when the researcher saw that she didn’t wake up, he saw an opportunity to crawl in and see if he could put his ear against her chest to hear her heart rate.  But even with his ear against her chest in the quiet of the den, he couldn’t hear a pulse.    Then, the den was filled with a strong heart beat.  She was waking up and pumping blood into her arms and legs.  As the researcher backed out of the den, she lifted her head.  Outside, he could still hear her heart at about 175 beats a minute.  A few minutes later, her heart slowed as the tranquilizer took effect and she drifted off to sleep.

Last winter, when Lily came out of the den in early March when Lynn visited, she had high heart rates as if she were pumping blood into her arms and legs.  As it got closer to the time she left the den, her heart didn’t surge like that when she came out, giving lower heart rates.  Lily was good enough to let him feel her heart for an easy pulse.

Thank you to Moe for bidding so generously today on the autographed script and thank you all for all you do.

—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center