Good cub views

Great cub views were captured at about 12:03 and 12:51 PM!  We looked at them over and over, looking for a third cub and trying to make more guesses about the sexes.  While other people were seeing a third cub, we couldn’t find it.  Our bet is still on two cubs, one lighter, one darker, with the lighter one most likely being a male and the other one a very questionable female.  Getting specific like that doesn’t leave us room to wiggle out of statements when we get proved wrong, so we’re setting ourselves up to eat our words.  All good fun.  One of these days, Lily will turn one of them over so we all get a better look.  Video of today's cub sightings can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u46j3qRWbKc.

Hope continues to make us empathize with the little sweetheart.  She wants her share of milk and wants to live peacefully with the little screamers.  We believe she was helping Lily lick them to eliminate wastes.  This would give Hope an opportunity to recycle those nutrients just like Lily does.

When we gave Hope a hand last summer, several questions were in the air about why Lily left her.  People speculated that:

1. Lily left her because Lily was young and inexperienced.
2. Lily left her because she sensed something was wrong with Hope and didn’t want to invest more time in her.
3. Lily was intentionally rejecting Hope and would kill her or ignore her if she ever saw Hope again.
4. Lily left her because the suckling of just one cub was not enough to prevent Lily from ovulating.

Pressure was on to let Hope die and learn nothing from that very extraordinary opportunity.  We wanted to learn.  To discuss the four speculations in order,

1. At 3 years of age, Lily was of the age at which most bears in the eastern US give birth.  She was not too young to be a good mother, and her mothering up to the time of abandonment seemed exemplary.
2. The only way to see if something was wrong with Hope was to observe her over time and see if she developed and behaved normally.  She is surviving just fine, and we can’t see anything wrong with her.
3. When Lily saw Hope, they nursed and played. Lily didn’t kill her or ignore her.
4. We believe #4 above was the explanation.  The most common litter size in northeastern Minnesota is three.  One cub might provide enough suckling to prevent ovulation for some mothers, but apparently not Lily.

Bears will vary in just about any trait we can imagine, and traits have a distribution that falls under a bell-shaped curved with most being in the middle but some being out in the tails.  Lily went off and mated, driven (we believe) by hormones and ovulation.  When mating season was over, she ran into Hope.  With her hormones in check, she became the usual good mother as we saw leading up to denning and as we can see in the den.

Lily is tolerant of Hope and lets her nurse (although giving preference to the newborn cubs).   Hope is fitting into the expanded family better than many of us thought.  We are viewing something no one has seen before and learning a little more about the minds and behavior of black bears.  By helping Hope, we took a big chance.  With the media and thousands of people watching, we risked major loss of credibility if things had gone badly.  We worried.  We’re happy things are turning out like they have.  We are all in for months of learning. Together.

Thank you for all you do.

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