Warm Weather and More Play

Play was in vogue in Lily’s den again on this warm day, and a dedicated Lily fan captured it for all to see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXcgVdAE4IM.

At this moment, the official temperature at the Ely Airport is 41 F.  That’s 79 degrees warmer than the coldest night about 3 weeks ago.  Snow is melting, which is unusual for this time of year—especially when southern states were setting records for cold the last few days.

There is a lot of snow this winter.  In Fargo, ND, people are filling sandbags to get ready for flooding in spring.  Snow on the flat garage roof here is 24 ¼ inches and very wet after a day of melting.  Two questions.  How strong is that roof and will Lily’s den accumulate any water over the next four days with highs predicted at 26, 37, 43, and 37 F?  We don’t think water will be a problem for Lily yet, but one of the things we will learn in late March or early April will almost certainly be how Lily and the family deal with water in the den.

But for now, we wonder if the warm temperatures stimulated the play we saw in Lily’s den the last couple days (will that be a pattern?) and if the cubs cry less about being cold when it is above freezing.  The Den-watch Team might capture a pattern.  We’ll see.

And with all the activity this winter, how much weight will these bears lose over winter?  Here are some figures from the old days of tranquilizing and weighing.  Overwinter percent weight loss:

These are averages Sue put together from those data.  They follow body size except for lactating mothers.  Yearlings have the biggest surface to mass ratio, so they lost over 27 percent.  Adult males had the biggest body size and therefore the smallest surface to mass ratio and they lost only 20.4%.  Adolescents and non-lactating females fell in between.  Hopefully, we’ll see how Lily and Hope compare with those figures.  A problem with them, though, is that they hardly come to the Research Center to get on the scale.  On August 28, 2010, they complied, though, and weighed 234.5 and 61 pounds.  They probably didn’t gain very much after that.  We hope they stop back in the spring to record their losses.

A big thank you and congratulations to Team Bear, the Pond Chat, and all the Lily fans who donated!  You raised about $5,000 this weekend and brought the debt down close to $90,000!  Unbelievable.  And you did it with all the problems of the new Facebook page.  Thank you! And thank you also to Olatz and the Green Bay Packers for donating great items for the drawings.

A cute story from Kelly Carlson.  While watching Lily and Hope, her 2nd grader said, "the babies are getting their mother’s milk".   Kelly asked how he knew that.  He said, “because their motors are running."

Thank you for all you do.

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