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By Lydia Rogers, coordinator for Walden Keeping Track, an organization interested in hearing about your local wild animal sightings. Lydia has been an animal tracker for five years; email her at lydiarogers@earthlink.net.
Cubs are born in dens around the first of February and emerge with their mothers in spring. There are one to four cubs in a litter, most often two. They stay with their mothers through the next winter and spring until they are about a year and a half old.
Bears often climb to escape danger, including other bears. White pines and hemlocks are preferred escape trees. They also climb for food such as beech nuts. Claw marks on beech trees (below, right) can persist for decades.
Walden Keeping Track, a local chapter of Keeping Track of Huntington, VT (www.keepingtrackinc.org) would be very interested in finding signs While some people would be thrilled to see a black bear in their town, others would find it frightening. However, black bears are not the aggressive predators often depicted in the media. In fact, black bear are mostly vegetarians, eating grasses and emerging vegetation in spring, berries and fruits in the summer, and acorns and nuts in the fall. Ant, hornet and other insect pupae are important protein sources. Dr. Lynn Rogers (below, left) at the Wildlife Research Institute Ely, MN recorded one black bear eating 7 gallons of tent caterpillars! Dr. Rogers is a nationally known bear expert. He was recently in Concord to talk about his 33 years of black bear research. By closely following bears over generations he has found that they are intelligent, fascinating and surprisingly timid. The most commonly believed fallacy is that mothers will defend their cubs against people. This is true for grizzly bears but extremely rare for black bears. He said that no one has ever been killed by a mother black bear defending her cubs. More than likely, any bear that sees you, including a mother, will quietly and quickly flee. In the northeast, there have been no fatal confrontations with black bear.
According to Dr. Rogers and others, the future of black bear depends on the public. Where bear live and how many survive is directly related to conservation of habitat and the public's tolerance of bears. To learn more about bear, see www.bear.org and www.bearstudy.org.
Photos: All the bear photographs in this article were used by kind permission of Dr. Rogers.
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Is the photo at right something you might see in Concord? The black bear (Ursus americanus) population has been doing well in Massachusetts in recent years, rising from only a hundred in the 1970s to more than 1700 today. Most live west of the Connecticut River, but they are increasingly being found in the Worcester area, according to biologist Jim Cardoza of Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife.
Before mating season in June and July, the mother will send the yearlings off. The young females establish themselves in the vicinity, but the subadult males sometimes wander more than 50 miles in search of a suitable place to settle. During their travels, they often encounter people and are killed.
of black bears in Concord. The community wildlife monitoring team has been documenting the presence of eight mammal species in the Concord/Lincoln area. Finding wide-ranging, habitat sensitive animals such as bears would help assess whether we still have healthy, connected core habitat despite encroachments from housing and roadways.
As more homes and roads are built in previously undeveloped areas, people are more likely to see bears. In years when natural food sources fail, bears may forage on human foods, including agricultural products and trash.
