One Week Old

Today, at one week old, it was great to hear the cubs’ voices getting deeper and stronger.

More wondering about the future and where Hope will fit in.  Two people sent information.

Karen Hauserman wrote, “Back around 2005, a four or five-year-old mother black bear who had a yearling and a cub seemed more devoted to the yearling.  It seemed as if the yearling took care of the cub more than she did.  The yearling was the one who would wait for the cub when the three of them were leaving.   The mother acted motherly to the yearling, and the yearling acted motherly to the cub.  The yearling occasionally joined the nursing sessions and occasionally had its own brief nursing sessions.”

Jackie Runions wrote about her dog, “My pug had an 8-month-old pup and a brand new litter.  Big Brother helped mom take care of the new litter.  If mom left the area, Big Brother would lie with the pups and clean them and lick them to induce defecation/urination.  When mom came back, Big Brother tried to join in the nursing.”

So, the good attention that Hope is giving the cubs, licking them and maybe helping to induce defecation/urination is not unexpected. We are anxious to see how this early bonding between Hope and her siblings plays out over the next year.

We’re still thinking about all you do, how much talent is out there and how you step forward to fill needs, organize into committees, and look for ways to help.  Moderators have spent untold volunteer hours helping.  Linda Gibson has been volunteering about 15 hours a day to search through the Den Cam archives to post video highlights and organize the archives as backup for the data recording the Den-watch Team is doing around the clock daily.  This is just stuff that you saw needs for and dove in.  At the same time, you are stepping up and supplying so many needs through the Amazon wish list.  Every bit of help makes the Bear Center and research stronger.

The Education Outreach Team put together an organized list of the information on bear.org with links to find each topic quickly.  They did it as a guide for teachers making lesson plans, but it also provides an easy reference for looking up your questions.  It takes you to the words, pictures, and videos on each topic on bear.org.  The easy reference page is at http://www.bear.org/website/images/stories/Documents/Black_Bear_Basics.pdf.

What makes bear.org special is that it is one of the few web sites that uses firsthand information.  The information is from 44 years of field research plus the best documented information from other studies.  The goal, as always, is to replace misconceptions with facts.  Doesn’t every web site do that?  No.  Misconceptions are so widespread that books, magazines, and websites that rely on written material and ‘common knowledge’ perpetuate the misconceptions.  This extends to some of the most authoritative writing that is out there.  Here are a few examples.

1. For years, authoritative books, biologists, newspapers, and magazines have stated as a fact that polar bears are solar-heated by UV rays that are channeled from the tips of the fur, down the hollow hairs, to the polar bear’s black skin where the energy is absorbed.  A problem was that it was not tested.  When a physicist tested it, he found it to be totally untrue.  Moreover, the idea didn’t make sense.  In winter, the sun doesn’t rise in the arctic, so there is no solar UV to heat the bears when they could use it.  In summer, solar heating would only worsen the polar bear’s problem of overheating.
2. A couple weeks ago, we bought a newly published $240-dollar book written by top biologists and edited by one of the most prestigious natural history institutions in the world.  We checked it out as a possible source for the Education Outreach Team.  The black bear section greeted us with a picture of a obviously tame bear that was trained to open its mouth wide on command for food rewards.  These obedient bears are the sources of the open-mouth bear photos on covers of hunting magazines and books about bear attacks.  These are the savage-looking bears that are shown close-up in TV programs—complete with computer-generated roars and growls.  Nowhere in the TV credits or book credits does it tell us that tame bears were used along with computer-generated sounds to create a climate of fear to draw viewers and readers.  Very misleading, and it happens a lot.   The truth is that bears, unlike dogs and cats, do not snarl when they feel threatened.  They are drawn that way in hunting magazines and are portrayed that way in taxidermy, but they don’t behave that way in reality.  Bears that are face to face may open their mouths during combat or play, but they don’t threaten each other or people that way from a distance.  So here in the supposedly authoritative book it showed a black bear standing all by itself with its mouth stretched open and a caption that read, “They may bare their teeth in an aggressive display as in this American Black Bear.”
3. In the same book, another picture of the same black bear taken by the same photographer showed another misleading situation.  The bear is sitting next to an adult deer carcass.  The caption reads, “White-tailed deer are so numerous in some forests and even suburban areas in the USA that they, and especially their fawns, can be an easy source of protein for the American Black Bear.  These bears kill opportunistically and also eat carrion.“   The truth is that killings of adult deer are so uncommon as to be noteworthy, as in this internet story that circulated today  http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110128/LIFE/101280311.
4. In London’s Royal Museum of Natural History, the bear exhibit includes a brown bear standing with an unnatural taxidermied snarl on its face and a caption about how bears stand up and intimidate opponents with snarls.  Completely untrue.
5. We checked out the website of one of the most respected sources of geographic and biological information.  This organization’s magazine and TV specials are considered authoritative by many, and we know that they often attempt to fact-check their stories.  We checked out their website as a possible source of information for lesson plans for the Education Outreach Team.  We looked at the grizzly bear account.  It read, “Mama bear doesn’t even wake up as her blind and hairless cub is born midwinter.  The tiny bear, about the size of a chipmunk, is just strong enough to crawl into a position where it settles in to nurse.”  Any Den Cam watcher knows better.  And for the size of the cubs, chipmunks weigh less than five ounces, while newborn grizzly cubs weigh close to a pound.

So, for the time being, we are asking the Education Outreach Team to use bear.org as the source for lesson plans.  The above list of links will help with that.

Thank you for all you do.

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