[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello again, everyone. Philip here. So in this episode, I'm welcoming Andy Try, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources bear project leader, into the Bear Den. I'm very excited about this one. Andy is a fountain of knowledge.
I learned so much during our chat. His answers are peppered with bear facts that only someone totally immersed in the bear world would know. So you can listen out for things like marine signatures discussing den visits.
This means the podcast can live up to its name as well. And we also hear what the DNR are studying right now. And we do cover the dnr, bear management practices, the methodology behind the various parts that make it up. We discuss human bear conflict and of course, talk education.
Things like education, communication, attractive management are all key elements to that and can't be emphasized enough.
Throughout, Andy's passion shines through and I hope you enjoy hearing from him as much as I did.
So let's go.
There is a place in the remote northwoods of Minnesota, North America. It's located near the town of orr, population approximately 300.
Outside of this town is an area where normal rules are put to one side. It's a place where humans and wildlife meet. It's a special place, wholly unique and not without its controversies.
This is the Vince Schutte Wildlife Sanctuary run by the American Bear Association, ABA for short.
The ABA is dedicated to promoting a better understanding of black bears and all wildlife through education, observation and experience.
I'm your host, Philip Stubley, and welcome to the Bear Den.
Hi Andy, how are we doing today?
Could you please introduce yourself and just sort of say where you're talking to us from?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Sure. So I'm Andy Try. I am the bear project leader for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and I'm calling in from Grand Rapids, Minnesota.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Oh, fabulous. And for anyone who might be sort of unfamiliar, can you just kind of describe what the Department of National Resources does?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Sure. So we are the state's agency that is charged with managing and conserving the state's wildlife. And so not only that, just wildlife fisheries, we have a forestry division that does management in state forests. We have enforcement that enforces the game and fish rules, waters regulations, that sort of thing. We have a lands and minerals department that manages sort of natural resource development, permitting, all that sort of deal, and then an ecosystem and waters group that, that does some of the water protection rules as well as the more non game stuff. So things that are not traditionally hit with a, you know, regulated sports season.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Oh, great. So covering a lot of bases there.
So yeah, I kind of want to ask a bit about your background. I always like to ask when people come on, like have you always wanted to work with bears specifically? And how do you came to this?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Sure, it's kind of a backwards windy road as it is with most people. I originally wanted to be a fisheries biologist and working on large pike and muskie and that sort of thing.
But I had issue getting through organic chemistry and switched to wildlife, which I liked just as much but it didn't have that requirement. And so after that I kind of took a long.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Windy road. I'd wanted to work with bears, but it's hard to get your foot in the door. And the timing with how the agency funds research and works with the university to get students and all that just wasn't working.
And so I went down to Southern Texas and got my master's degree working on bobwhite quail and then connected with a bear biologist who was working in Coahuila, Mexico on some some bear bear population dynamics work and helped her organize a conference in Monterrey, Mexico that year. And then that leveraged some of those connections through the bear world to get me up trapping bears as a volunteer for dnr.
And they stuck us out in a remote field station for a summer which was great.
But again the funding thing and the timing didn't work out. So I went back and actually managed a truck on loan team at a local big box chain store which there's a lot of transferable skills about people management and working with people from 16 their first job all the way up to retired folks.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: But after that again it wasn't the job I wanted or the career I wanted.
And it was at the same time when the I think of the second economic collapse collapse like the 0809, you know, housing global housing meltdown and economy economic drop. But I landed a position in 2011, my PhD work out in the eastern United States at West Virginia University and we were looking at urban bears in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and West Virginia. Looking at do bears stay in town all the time? Is regulated hunting a way to help influence the populations and kind of what bears are doing in town? And so after that did a postdoc back in South Texas as a quantitative person doing lots of analysis and working on tons of different projects from egrets to ducks to Neil Guy Antelope, deer.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Quail, all kinds of stuff. And then the job opened up in Minnesota working for my predecessor, Dave Garcelles.
The predecessor to the role I backfilled had been filled for 34 years. So not a lot of turnover in the bear world. And then when my predecessor Dave retired in 2020, I moved into that role, and I've been there ever since. So he had. I think he had that job for like 37 and a half years or something like that. Oh, wow.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: He's definitely ingrained. There wasn't. Hey, I guess. Well, I'm sure you picked up a lot from him then. Would you say, like, big shoes to.
[00:06:01] Speaker B: Fill or very big shoes to fill? For sure.
Lots of institutional knowledge that luckily we had worked together for seven or eight years prior to that point. So I was able to absorb as much as I possibly could, like a sponge. Of course, he's probably forgotten more things than I know about bears, but that's just. That's just how it goes.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: I mean, you've traveled around quite a lot then. And I'm intrigued about when you first mentioned Mexico. And obviously popular. Managing the bear population down there, I imagine. Is there, like quite a lot, I guess a lot of farmland out there. Is there sort of a bit of problems there with bears reading crops, is it?
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Or almost none. It's mostly montane cattle ranches. And so then there's. It's one of the few spots in the, you know, in the American black bear range where there's issues with cattle depredations. And so when.
When there's a really bad drought, it collects the cattle nearby the watering tanks.
And if there's enough brush near the watering tanks, it creates screening cover, and the bears can come in and take calves underneath the barbed wire fence and then eat them and cache them.
And so some of the early work there, what they found is if you clear brush near the water tanks and then leave the horns on the Mexican shorthorn cattle, they'll actually mob the bears.
One of the research bears had a punctured lung because the cows had defended their calves so well. So, um, just some minor tweaks to. To keep the cows and the bears separated. Work pretty well. Also keeping a cowboy out with the herd is an extra set of eyes. And then all the cattle, dogs, et cetera, to. To watch out for bears.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's really interesting. So learn something new every day. Coming back to sort of Minnesota, then. I think I'm probably right in saying this. The population of black bears in Minnesota has been increasing since, like, over the last decade or so. What are the factors affecting that?
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Yeah, so the primary factors that drive bear populations, at least in the United States, is direct mortality. And so for most states that have a regulated sport hunting season, that is the direct mortality Source in places where hunting is not allowed or they are recovering populations, often this is filled in by.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Car collisions or bears shot in a human bear conflict situation.
So for us, we, the bear population kind of bottomed out in the 60s.
Back then it was a bounty species. And the last Bounty fell in 1965 in Beltrami County. And so what a bounty species means is essentially that the counties would pay you a fee for every bear that you killed, and they would only pay the fee in some cases if you killed the entire family of bears. And the idea here misplaced in hindsight, and we just had a different sentiment, a different view of the world in general society back then with. With predators, or at least carnivores in general, that, you know, they needed to be eliminated just to help, you know, agriculture proceed as usual. And so we only had bears probably in the northeastern, one third of the state or so, and at fairly low numbers probably in 1971. I believe that was the very first year where they became a big game species.
And by actually making them a hunted species, that protected them. And so it took the mortality from 365 days a year, or at least whenever bears are out, down to six weeks. And so we regulate what you wear while you're hunting, what sort of firearm you can use or weapon when you go, how many people can go, what you do, it's super highly regulated, how many people can go at a time, that sort of thing.
And so through the 70s, there was a limited sport hunt. Everybody who does this just happened to often get a bear tag with their deer license. And harvest wasn't very huge at the time. By the 1980s, the bear population was pretty darn low. I think we figured we had somewhere near 8,000 bear statewide. And we instituted a quota system where hunters would have to put into this lottery for the opportunity to go hunting.
And what that did is it. Is it decreased the mortality even more, and it kept it under about 15% when you get there. That allows the bear population to just explode. Because once they. Once you have a number of reproductive females in the population, it really can be a positive feedback loop through the population. And they can have a lot of cubs. It takes them a while to get there. You know, they are, on average, it's four or five before they have that first litter of cubs. But it's every other year she's having a litter and cub survival is really high. It's about 80%. And so most of those cubs will make it through. At that point, we kind of peaked out in the late 90s, early 2000s, with the overall population and the main driving force there is we had two bad food years with really high numbers of hunting tags. And so we started cutting things back.
It killed a good proportion of the reproducing females in the statewide population. In addition, there was significant property damage going on, especially with agriculture, agricultural producers where this is, you know, there's a thing in ecology called carrying capacity. Like that's the maximum limit that the land can sustain of a given species.
We never got anywhere close with that for bears, but there's a lower level, which is the sociological or society's carrying capacity, where they'll only tolerate so many critters on the landscape because of damage. And so we certainly were there at 25,000. We issued more tags and then the population took a dive. And so from 20, about 2001, 2002 down to 2012, we lost half of the bears in about, you know, about a decade.
So it was successful, but we didn't want to drop quite as far as we did in 2013. We cut permits way, way back to 1980s levels. And the population has been slowly increasing in the majority of the state, you know, 1 to 2% per year.
Oddly enough, in the, the edge of bear range, there's a lot of good food out there. And so out there, that population has been clipping along, you know, 2 to 5% per year, so growing at a pretty fast rate through this whole time. And so there's, there's a spatial scale component to all this, but basically 80% of all the things that can possibly kill, kill bears is made up of legal hunting.
And so we have, you know, we can't control, you know, whether a person decides to shoot a bear. In human bear conflict, we can't control road collisions, really, without building giant, massive infrastructures. We can't control what natural foods are, but we can't control the number of people that are out hunting. And so it works pretty well for us to just trim back or increase the number of tags to get an overall change in the population trajectory.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: In your opinion, is it like the trajectory, the population trajectory? At a minute, it's fairly healthy. It's all right. You're not too concerned with it at the minute?
[00:13:07] Speaker B: No, we're, we operate in the Goldilocks realm where 25,000 was too high, 10,000 is too low. So somewhere in the middle, stable is, is what we're after. We don't have a set population target.
The reason being that if you, once you set that target, you're always going to be wrong and you're, you can aim towards that target. But in general, what works for us is looking for population trend and stability.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it sounds right. And I mean, how do the bears contribute to like the wider forest ecosystem?
[00:13:39] Speaker B: Sure. So they are big time seed dispersers is the primary deal. And so, you know, bears are moving up to five miles a day, they're eating tons and tons of berries. And then.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: They have a very, how to phrase this, a very high throughput digestive system. And so they'll leave big scats loaded with partially digested fruit and seeds and stuff.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: I've seen it, don't worry.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And so some of the work actually in Scandinavia has shown that bilberries, which is a relative of blueberries that we have here, it's a Vaccinium species, they really only propagate via seed once they've been through the digestive tract of a mammal. And so without bears and other critters eating these berries, there just wouldn't be blue blueberries on the landscape. So they're very highly tied to that and in, in other ways and other places you can find like in the west coast where we have salmon runs, their bears will carry the isotopes found in salmon. So fish have a very to back up a little bit. You can look at the chemistry in what bears eat or we are what we eat. And there's some ratio of carbon and nitrogen that you can find only in marine species.
And they've been able to go find it on the landscape up the Snake river and the Columbia river all the way into Idaho. So like hundreds of hundreds of miles or multiple hundreds of kilometers away from the ocean, you're finding these marine signatures incorporated into tree tissues.
And so they're moving nutrients into the forest as they move around eating.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: Oh, that's really cool. Well, you mentioned obviously salmon and I knew you'd get some fish knowledge in there at some point. Is there particular difference in black bear behavior in Minnesota to other areas of North America?
[00:15:31] Speaker B: It just kind of, it depends on what the food resources are, I think, for most of their behavior.
So we obviously have long winters here. So hibernation is a big deal as you move farther south. I'm not quite sure where the line is. But in general, the only bears that enter dens are females that are going to give birth to cubs. Other times you'll have males just kind of hang out, lay in daybeds for a few days. They're less active, but they don't actually hibernate for us.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: It'S kind of an interesting juxtaposition of forest with agricultural production. Corn production has increased exponentially in the last few decades. And so we have more corn on the landscape than ever.
And so that is a challenge in general, but seems to be more and more of a challenge every year just dealing with that, you know, corn producer.
You know, corn prices have increased and then when corn prices are high, there's less tolerance for damage, that sort of thing. But in general, for us bears in the north, woods are pretty, pretty standard across most of the United States.
We have multiple biomes where, you know, in the far north it's more boreal forests similar to southern Canada. We have more deciduous forest kind of in the central part of the state and then formally what were prairies. And so there's a nutritional gradient that follows that where bears will be produced younger in that deciduous zone than the farm boreal just because there's more food.
But fish, bears don't eat fish here.
There are some places in Canada where they'll set up on, on white and red sucker runs, but we are very far away from, from the coasts for salmon.
We do have some salmon in the Great Lakes, but in general those are all stocked. And those runs are not nothing like Alaska or the Pacific Northwest.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I guess as well, if it's not really been part of a bear's diet or when it was a cub, it didn't really learn to eat them. It's probably just doesn't even consider them.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: I think that's probably fair. In the Northwest, you know, they'll eat a fair amount of salmon where they can find it, but that's not a primary piece of their diet here. It's almost all vegetation and berries and nuts.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Yeah, no good diet to have. We're talking in say like mid November. I know you'll be gearing up for your bear den visits and whatnot. What are black bears doing pretty much at the moment? I mean, for the most part I feel like you're going to just tell me. They're mostly denning right now.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: So yeah, most of them should be in their winter dens. Kind of peak denning in general is somewhere around the first or second week of October for females that are going to give birth, the rest of them kind of settle in one to two weeks later and then the males are sometimes out a bit a bit later after that.
We're in the second weekend of our deer hunting season. And so sometimes hunters will accidentally bump, bump bears out of like brush dens or whatnot, but they're not in deep hibernation yet. And so it's no big deal. The ground's not quite frozen, so they can, you know, find another den if they absolutely need to. But we do get a few pictures and few reports of bears out and about eating awful piles that are left by the hunters and a few little bits of. Of crop damage. But most everybody's harvested by now and all the bears are should be heading to sleep soon.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And on that sort of note, I know there's a bit of a debate sometimes with people if bears are true hibernators. You know, if, like, because they decrease their metabolism, they do say, well, they are hibernators. But I know people say topper versus hibernation. You know, I just kind of wanted to know what your take on it was.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: I think that debate is much overblown.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: Most of the bear biologists in general call it hibernation.
Bears just kind of do it in their own way. Their body temperature drop 10 degrees, their basal metabolism drops really low. Their heart will stop for up to 30 seconds at a time in between breaths.
And so it's hibernation. But it's different than, say, a ground squirrel or a marmot or something like that.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: No fair play sort of thing. I don't consider it too much, but it seems like every time you'll see someone on social media, they'll post something about hibernation and there's always a comment going. It's not that it's chopper or whatever. So just wondered.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Yeah, we don't bother with the semantics on that one.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Fair enough. Got more important things to worry about. I suppose so, yeah. What was the 2025 season like for bears? Like, in relation to berries, food availability? Was it much different to previous years or good, bad, other kind of average.
[00:20:09] Speaker B: This year or above average? I would say at a statewide level, we had berries in some places that were quite abundant. The blueberries didn't really pan out all that well this year. But, you know, relative to the year before, which had essentially statewide food failure, it was a much better year.
Unfortunately, our neighbors to the north in western Ontario didn't have quite such good berry production due to their drought.
And so we had a number of bears both killed in the hunter harvest, as well as more human bear conflict than I would have predicted, given the food situations. But it's quite likely that these are bears that have crossed the border. Bears don't read signs. Bears don't follow, you know, political boundaries. And so it's Very likely. We had some Ontario bears come over. It's just unknown what the. How many or that sort of thing. But in general it was a pretty good year for bears, for sure.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Oh, that's good. And I mean with sort of spring arriving sometimes a bit earlier or winter arriving a bit later, that kind of. Have you seen much effect there?
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Not really in general. If, if you have an early spring that moves that.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: The.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Like green update a little bit earlier. One thing we do see if, if spring comes early is that.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: Just that the, the melt is much more flashy or two, two or three years ago we had basically, you know, minimal snow into February and March. And so it was very odd walking to dens and tennis shoes, but rather than snowshoes.
But aside from that, they'll, they'll hang out in their den till they're ready. The females with cubs won't leave until the cubs are old enough to climb and they're secure.
And you know, with the climate changing, the big deal that we seem, you know, anecdotally that we notice is that the bears are a little more awake when we go to the dens. We used to be able to go all the way to April. Now if we're not done by mid March, the bears are just a little bit more flighty, but if not disturbed, they'll, they'll do their thing.
The early melts that happen in March sometimes are a little more frequent than they used to be. And so the probability of like a den getting wet.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Increases. But again, they just will grab some boughs from the local trees, make a nest at the base of a big tree and, and they'll be just fine. They're well adapted to, you know, living from essentially the edge of the tundra and the timberline in Canada all the way into central Mexico. So they can make do with just about anything.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: Well, like you say, yeah, bears, yeah, they adapt to a situation when they need to. Yeah. At the Vince Shooting Wildlife Sanctuary, you've come and you've carried out a couple of programs very kindly. You've come and sort of talked to the interns about the dnr and you in the past have radio collared some bears and you also tested some electric fence equipment. I just wondered if you could talk about that and sort of how effective those tests were and any results you got from there.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: Sure. We just have a paper accepted for submission in the Wildlife Society Bulletin on this work.
We had something like 40 fence grids across the state. And so the test was just compare, put a bird Feeder inside and outside the fence. And what's the rate of protection of the fenced feeder? And so in a good food year that was 2020.
[00:23:36] Speaker B: So two winter or two summers ago, I should say it was quite a good food year. And the feeders in the fence, 100% of them survived the whole study duration, whereas about two thirds of them survived outside the fence in the bad food year with a number of failures.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: About 75% of the feeders inside were undamaged. And the ones on the outside, 50% or so were damaged or slightly more than 50% were damaged. So it is the most effective way to keep bears out of your stuff.
It will. The shock hurts, but it won't permanently harm the modern fencing.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Energizers that you can use these days are really safe. It's just a minute shock. It's nothing like the 60s or you know, Jurassic park where they've got warning 10,000 volts. You know, it's, there's a difference between, you know, resistance amperage and voltage. And the way these are set up, you know, I will, I have accidentally zapped myself and it's, you know, it's a, it's like a big static shock. But it is enough to protect whatever you're trying to protect from bears. It works.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: Well, no, that's great. No, I mean I, I sympathize with the electric fence because with my work in Borneo, we obviously install electric fences in some of the enclosures and I zap myself. It's not fun. But then obviously you feel bad for the bears because you need them to come out and you want them to like, obviously. Lynn, touch. They learn very quickly. Touch it once, maybe twice. And then they're like, yeah, I'm not going near that again. So yeah, no, it is very effective.
Oh, that's great. I'll have to look out for that paper when it comes out. What is the focus of your studies at the moment? I know you mentioned about studying urban bears earlier and I think that's. Am I right in thinking that's what you're focusing on? Radio collaring urban bears at the moment?
[00:25:28] Speaker B: That's a piece of it for sure.
So the statewide work right now we have a long term monitoring project we're going on.
We've, we've got about four decades worth of data and so some of it is summarizing some of those long term trends in body mass and weight and food conditions, survival, that sort of thing.
And reproduction, of course.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: And so we are collaring a number of bears in our traditional study areas and some outside that to figure out when age of first reproduction happens because we think it's changing. The habitats on the edge of bear range are getting better and bears are getting fatter faster.
We just submitted a paper about two weeks ago that shows females in the fall hunting season. Right now, three year old females on the edge of bear range weigh what five or six year old bears did back in the 80s.
Similarly, in the core of bear range, three year old bears are weighing what four and five year olds did back in the 80s. So they're the reaching that the growth rate pitch is much steeper now than it used to be and that's generally all due to food, which is changing.
Similarly, we are doing some work in the city of Duluth and it's the surrounding municipalities. It's a collaborative research project with the Natural Resources Research Institute at University of Minnesota Duluth.
And so their bigger project is looking at bobcats.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Coyotes and bears in town and seeing where they go, what they do, what sort of research resources are they using and then just are they, you know, do they ever leave town? So from a management perspective, if you're having tons of human bear conflict, often what's suggested is well, let's increase the number of hunting tags in the area and in general that could work.
But if the bears never leave an area where you can, you know, get to an area where you can discharge a firearm, it's probably not the most effective tool to do that. And you can do a lot with, you know, attract to control bear resistant trash cans, that sort of thing as well. So those are kind of the major key questions on the bear side. But yeah, we're collaborating with umd. It's a nice new project and there's a lot of bears in Duluth and we just don't know what they do. So it's, it's gonna be interesting to.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: See just a picture and like bears wandering down downtown Duluth. It's just.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, well, like you say, I mean you want to remove the attractant, right. If you don't want the bear there, you just shoot it. Another one's going to come along, right. And just take its place.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Yep, that's right. It'll, that's an empty niche and you know, they will take the easy route. You know, a normal bird feeder is something like 5,000 calories of black oil sunflowers. They'd need 20 pounds of berries to get anywhere close to that. And so it's, it's just a no brainer and it's the easiest, easiest way you can reduce human bear conflict is securing those attractants.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: No, that's great. And obviously, like you were saying, electric fences, I know that there's bear mats as well, that they seem to be really effective as well.
So, yeah, you've got decades worth of data, I think, dating from back 1981, I think, is when DNR started everything. And you've collared, I know, hundreds of individuals by this point, I'm sure.
So what are the sort of methods you're using to collect data? Sort of any new emerging technologies that you're kind of using as well?
[00:28:59] Speaker B: It's changed a lot since the early days. In the old days, we had some fairly ineffective pharmaceuticals to anesthetize the bears. We had basic VHF radio collars. We used to have to fly three times a week to get their locations.
And that was back of it. You know, there were no computers to speak of at the office, so the amount of time spent on emails was zero.
Nowadays we have GPS satellite callers that are sending.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: Locations every three to four hours on most of these bears to a website. You can track them in not real time, but fairly recently you can see where they were.
We have really good and safe anesthetics now and some of the camera stuff that's coming or camera collars that are coming out are pretty neat. You can see what the bears are doing. We've got some footage them like 30ft up an aspen tree munching on buds or rough housing with the cubs, that sort of thing.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: How long do those cameras last or do. Are they going to motion sensor or whatever?
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Yeah, they take a video that you can specify however long with each location. So you have a geo reference video for each location. And so the collars for ours, the ones without cameras, will last five years on an animal. We. We still go out every single winter to adjust the fit because bears will grow and shrink, you know, 50% of their body weight is not out of the realm of imagination, you know, for the course of a year.
And so we go out every single winter to every single bear that we have collared. Once you hang a collar on that bear, you're now responsible to make sure that there's no sort of fit issues or that sort of thing.
In case the collars fail, we have some leather, breakaway links that will fall off after a year, so it'll just kind of rot, not rot, but it'll dry out and the leather will dry out and snap and then the collar will fall off and then it's not stuck on the bear forever. But yeah, we go in mostly it's den work. These days we do a little bit of trapping, but, you know, for the traps, it's. It's essentially two and a half steel barrels welded together with a drop door. When they go into the trap, eat the trail mix, pull on it, and then it drops the door.
And then we anesthetize them and tag them and call them that way.
[00:31:24] Speaker A: I get you. Is it sort of special. More of a special case when you.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Use the truck just kind of to fill in the middle gap. So if we had a really year where we're taking some callers off to study new individuals, or we don't have collared bears in the area where we can't call those yearlings, that's when we would employ traps like this Duluth study. We haven't had any bears anywhere near Duluth in a long time, so traps works well. And then the rest is. Is mostly den work. And so it's. You go up to the den, there's a VHF beacon, so we know where the den roughly is.
And then we put a cloth over the. The den and sneak underneath. And from the edge, we inject them with anesthesia medicine to put them under full general anesthesia, pull them out and adjust the collar fit. If there's cubs, then we have to keep the cubs warm. If there's yearlings. Right now we're focused on female yearlings, so following them until they have that first litter cubs. So they'll all get a collar in your tags now. The females at least. And then once everybody we take body measurements, hair, blood, that sort of sample, then everybody goes back in, they're all snuggled together, and then the anesthesia wears off after about three, four hours and they go right back to hibernation.
[00:32:41] Speaker A: Oh, great. And how many bear den visits do you do sort of on average a season?
[00:32:46] Speaker B: On an average year, probably 30. I'm guessing this winter will be close to 50 or 60 is my guess.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Oh, wow. It's a lot.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of work. And most of them have to be done in. In the first two weeks of March and maybe the last two weeks of February just to keep, you know, Cubs are born at roughly the same time period every year. And so to get your weight weights standardized, you need to collect them at the same time.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: Yeah. So you'll be rushing around all over the place.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yep, for sure.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: So on that front, yeah. Any sort of memorable experiences from times in the field or any particular.
Any oops moments you can kind of laugh about? Now.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: I mean, lots of oops moments, getting the snowmobile stuck or the truck stuck or, you know, getting in goofy situations where you have to think creatively about how you're going to get out.
But mostly that's just, you know, between here and the den itself, the transport. You know, I can think of one situation where we were going in on a huge chunk of state land and following what were snowmobile trails and then logging roads and then logging trails and then it turned into game trails. It's like, okay, now how are we going to turn this thing around and get out? Snow is very deep, you know, up, waist deep. And so that's always an exciting challenge for logistics. But.
[00:34:09] Speaker B: The, there's really nothing like it, especially when there's just a light dusting of snow coming down.
It's very quiet in the woods. We do a lot of work in swamps. Bears do enjoy swampy areas for making nest ends. And they're very isolated. It's more of a male deal to go up to these big remote swamps, but females will do it as well and have cubs there.
And you know, it's just dead calm, quiet and the only thing you can hear are the chickadees and the, the crossbills and the red poles flitting around and eating seeds out of the, out of the trees or the, the shrubs. And it's just a very peaceful and serene place to be.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: No, as I say, you're painting a nice little picture there. I know you said you've got a couple of papers coming out. I'm just wondering like what the most exciting results or things you've learned about bears and population dynamics. I guess recently in Minnesota.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: Yeah, most recently. It's time to pull some of these long term data sets together. And so.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: The bears getting fatter faster and growing quicker is not something that we had.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: Explored before. We had no idea and that was a complete surprise to us.
And so what that does for us is that we can get the age of first reproduction from teeth in the more northern latitudes. But it is not working as well if those bears reproduce at younger ages and get real fat real fast. And so it forces us to literally collect that data and follow cubs until they have that first litter. But some of the long term stuff that we're looking at is, yes, those growth rates.
One of the things I want to look at next is how the food production has changed through time. I'd like to see if there's any shift in phenology or overall food production through time. And it's I feel very lucky to be coming at this stage of the process where there's always already decades full of data that we can tap into.
And so it's, everything we do is applied. So you still have to tailor it back to a specific management question. But we've learned a lot of cool stuff on the side.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: You know, along the way. Bears will migrate hundreds of miles and oftentimes they'll go these same feeding areas year after year. They're just these oak patches out in the middle of nowhere, but they'll follow the same migratory routes every year. Like you can look at the path of the points in the GPS collars and it's the same path that we identified in the 80s. And so there's some sort of historical knowledge. It's probably mom teaching the offspring.
But I've got bears that'll migrate, you know, hundreds of miles out in the middle of nowhere to have cubs. I have one female in Grand Rapids. She will go up through Lake Verbillion up into the boundary waters.
So probably 160km as the crow flies, and then Dan in the middle of a cedar swamp, even though she's passed hundreds of cedar swamps to get there. So. But there's something that draws her there.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That is really cool. Like, yeah. Are you like, I guess you're sharing and comparing data with like neighboring states as well. I mean, are you seeing any of these kind of trends around?
[00:37:25] Speaker B: The other neighboring states are in kind of different levels with their population.
We go to conferences and we publish papers to share with the neighbors. But in general, Wisconsin has more bears than we do and they're, they're trying to get a handle on this reproduction as well.
That's kind of the one missing piece from their long term data.
On the western side, the Dakotas are starting to have bears regularly. South Dakota had a few bear sightings this year on the eastern side, but we have females and cubs that have pushed over from Minnesota going into North Dakota. So there's a small breeding population now in North Dakota. And so mostly it's just like trying to prepare them for what will eventually come. It'll always be a pretty small population. The habitat isn't great.
But how to minimize some of the conflict issues which really can drive management if you're not prepared for it.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Well, luckily you can go, here's, you know, 40 years worth of data. Have a look.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: It's like, yeah.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: Oh, that's, that's great. I was also wondering, like, what's, is there something, what's unique about like working with, say, a sanctuary like Vince Schutte versus wild bears.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: Well, you know, quote unquote, wild bears, it's very different.
I can remember the first time I went and just seeing the density of bears is extremely high.
[00:38:46] Speaker B: You know, you just don't. You can't go out to any place and just be in that many bears at any given time. So that was kind of surreal, I think, the first time I went there. But in general, bears are bears and they're driven by food. And so in working with, you know, for that collaring study, we wanted to figure out where they went. We didn't have very large sample size, but in general, a lot of them kind of stayed near the sanctuary.
Others took those long migrations. One went north and another one went another 80km due south and end up on a mine pit and then eventually came back. And so it's.
It's very interesting to. To understand just why that draw might be there. And maybe I'm always surprised that we don't have more bears that are migrating through that'll stop there and hang out for a while, but they just generally don't. So it's very interesting.
[00:39:47] Speaker A: No, it's interesting to hear your sort of take on it. How are you engaging? I know you say you get calls probably all the time. It's probably calls from the public. I mean, how are you engaging with them? With outreach and education.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: So for the most part, the outreach and education piece is couched in bearwise. And so bearwise is a national program hosted by the association of Fish and Wildlife agencies. And so agencies pay in for this. Like, it's essentially a turnkey comms plan.
And so whether you already have a big comms and outreach.
[00:40:23] Speaker B: Section, you can adapt it for your use or for those states that don't or are new to having bears, such as Iowa or South Dakota, you have everything essentially ready to go. And it focuses on attractant management, you know, leaving bears alone, securing your food, keep your trash put away, keep your grill secure, that sort of stuff.
And that's the highest priority right now. Most of the bear calls that come into the agency are, hey, I got a bear in my yard, what do I do? Or, hey, a bear knocked over my trash cans. How can I prevent that? What can I do?
Our agency doesn't trap and move bears. We haven't done that for, gosh, 25 years now.
And so the reason we don't move bears is because you're taking a bear, dropping it off in an area, it's not Familiar with. If you don't go far enough, it's likely they will come back.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: Just because they migrate long distances.
And furthermore, it doesn't solve the underlying issue which is those attractants.
And so we push it back on and work with the public to get those attractants secured rather than, you know, just providing a quick, a quick solution to solve the symptom rather than the underlying cause.
[00:41:38] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I'm glad you actually mentioned bear wise because obviously we, we use the educational materials from there. We always point people to it, help people exist, coexist peacefully with bears. And then I think there's a general push for, to ensure consistent messaging. Like there's a advice, everyone should point the bear wise essentially across the board.
[00:41:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a, it's a fabulous program. And the idea here is, is essentially 50 states of bear wise. And so whether you have bears in your state or not, often people recreate in places with bears. You know, we get people in northern Minnesota from all over the world. And so getting that clear, consistent messaging is, is super important. And so they know what to do when they're in bear country because more of the country is bear country now.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: Very true. And are there kind of any trends you see like with, with human bear conflict?
[00:42:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say so. To back up a little bit, there are more American black bears on the continent than there are all other bear species combined worldwide by a wide margin.
And they are the largest or the best example of a conservation success story of any carnivore that I can think of.
And the reason being is that the states locked down the amount and reduced the, the direct mortality they managed for habitat to allow bears to recover.
Society has changed its temperament and appreciates bears instead of viewing them as varmints.
In some cases, the federal government has stepped in where there are subspecies endangered like the Louisiana black bear or the Florida black bear in the, you know, 10, 15 years ago. But they've all been delisted. And so bears have recovered most everywhere and are pushing into areas they haven't been seen and you know, since European settlement in some cases.
And so with that comes, you know, there's more people in the United States than ever before. There's more bears in the United States than there has been probably in a real long time, if not ever.
And so when you have people and you have bears, there is conflict. And I would say the vast majority of all the other bear managers I talk to, conflict is what drives most of their day to day. And so if you don't have A strong push to get that information out there and work with people to meet them where they are, secure their attractants.
It'll overrun your day to day work and you won't be able to get anything else done. And so it's conflict in general is up in a lot of states. Just because bears have recovered, there's more people and they're, you know, bears are not this paragon of, of wilderness like people think they are. They can thrive near people and they like what people put out for them, you know, fruit trees and that sort of thing. So they're very.
[00:44:31] Speaker B: Adaptive critters for sure.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: Like you say things like education, communication, those are kind of the most effective management practices for protecting bears. Would you agree?
[00:44:43] Speaker B: I think so. I think so. That's kind of like the first step that most people take.
It's hard to get people to change their behavior before they have an interaction with a bear. So like till the trash can is knocked over. And so being preemptive is important.
But oftentimes that direct experience that oh, hey, I need to actually change what I'm doing, it will actually get that behavioral change quicker.
[00:45:07] Speaker A: Seeing is believing in a way, truly. Yeah, I believe you.
And I wondered as well, like as, as like land use change kind of affected or any of that, like especially the bear populations of Minnesota. Is that something you've seen?
[00:45:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it depends on what time scale you're talking about. You know, from the, the early 1800s, 1700s. Absolutely. You know, we have logged off almost all of the big mature white pines and red pines that we had in the state, the forests. We have now our second or third or fourth cutovers from that original old growth forest. And so that's changed things a lot. What it has done is actually created more habitat for bears in some cases because we have oaks, more oak on the landscape and you know, more understory brush available.
But in general, development does cause some issues. And if we are taking, you know, forest and converting forest into agriculture production or housing developments, that, that is habitat destruction. But in general, most of the development we're seeing is kind of on the fringe of bear range. And so it's, it's not a specific conservation threat where it might be for other species.
Oh, okay.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: It's interesting.
And I suppose as you mentioned, you get calls. I mean, what are the sort of public concerns about bears and what are the sort of misconceptions you kind of find yourself addressing?
[00:46:38] Speaker B: The biggest call is, hey, I had a bear in my yard. It's going to eat my grandkids my pets, my kids. It's often less concerned for their own kids, but their grandkids. And so I think it's a generational thing, but irrespective, it's more of a fear thing for a lot of people or they just want to feed birds and that's incompatible with living in bear country, at least during the summertime.
And so I would say of the attractor related calls, half are bird feeders, half are trash. Of the variety of calls, the first is hey, I got a bear in my yard, I'm worried about it, what can I do? And so those all again dovetail to the the bears are here for a reason.
Generally, you know, they could be walking through but generally they're here for something. And so we work with folks to get those attractions secured. But as for myths, you know, we, we get some calls sometimes about, you know, wolves are killing all the bear cubs and that's why we cut permits, you know, and that's not true either.
Wolves take a very small proportion of the bears in any given year. Wolf populations have been stable for at least a decade or more. Bear populations are down mostly because of over hunting and we increase the permits to get the population at a lower level. And so that's why permits are the way they are. So it's, you get all kinds of interesting calls and people's.
[00:48:06] Speaker B: Views on things. And that's one of the things I love most about this job is just trying to meet people where they are and maybe correct some misinformation. You're not going to sway everybody. That's a lost cause. But being able to at least provide them some factual information, let them make their own decisions, is, is and just interact with people is, is one of the best parts about working for a state agency.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: No, that's great. And actually what is your favorite bear fact? That's something I'd like to know about.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: It's probably the age of first reproduction thing. I think it until a few years ago and I think this is still the case. But in general most bears don't reproduce till five and that's the longest weight I think of any large mammal for sure in our state. But I think in the lower 48 that they wait that long before they have that first litter of cubs. And if you move into Canada, sometimes those boreal bears are not reproducing till 7, 8, sometimes 9 just because the foods are so poor.
And so as you might imagine that direct mortality when it takes so long to reproduce can have an additive effect at that point. But yeah, it's, it's certainly that it, that it takes a long time for bears to have that first litter of cubs, but it's completely conditional on food and growth.
[00:49:19] Speaker A: So. Well, I mean if a bear, I mean if the conditions were right, let's say they could have, they could potentially have a cub earlier than that.
[00:49:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So like two thirds of the bears that we've collared in the last 10 years out on the edge of bear range, so central Minnesota, they're having cubs at three and so these are bears that are bred at two and having cubs at three out east and in Florida specifically, I had a few in New Jersey as well. We had a few bears that were old enough or large enough as yearlings to be bred as yearlings, go into estrus as a yearling like right after being kicked out from mom at family breakup and then gave birth to cubs at two because they were just so massive.
[00:49:56] Speaker A: Wow, that just feels far too young. Like be reproducing. Barely know what they're doing themselves at that point.
[00:50:02] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. The litter sizes are smaller, the cubs are smaller, that first litter, but they do survive and again it's just all tied to that food production and I.
[00:50:12] Speaker A: Suppose as well on the opposite end, I mean eventually obviously they'll stop giving birth to cubs, but I suppose if food resources are good enough they can keep going well into sort of their 20s and beyond.
[00:50:24] Speaker B: Right, yeah. So we only have like two samples where we, the bear has reached, you know, reproductive senescence is the five dollar word for that where they stop having cubs and it's been right around 25 there.
We then monitor bear and to see if she could see. Monitor until her death basically. And so she was the only bear that we've ever had that's died of old age. And she was 39 and a half when she passed. Yes, she was, yeah. Blind cataracts, couldn't hear, people would honk their horns and she wouldn't even react. And so, you know, she survived a really long time. I say that's beyond atypical, you know, for, for most bears, but it can happen.
[00:51:10] Speaker A: That's interesting. I know that at the sanctuary, this is going back, I think when I first went, there was a bear that, well, her name was Biscuit and she was born in 1989 and I think she, so I met, so met her in 2014 and she hadn't had cubs I think for a couple of years. And then a couple of years down the line, it was 2017, she came in with two cubs. So I mean shoe and she, it seemed to take a toll on her having those cubs. I think what she was like 27 at that point or 28 maybe. Yeah. And yeah, she didn't come back the next year actually. We think partly because the having two cubs probably took it right out of her.
[00:51:48] Speaker B: Yeah. It's possible that, you know, she was so depleted she needed to visit a hunter's bait to, to replenish those stocks. It's possible. But again, when you're 27, that's really old for a bear. Your teeth are really worn down.
[00:52:00] Speaker A: Well, yeah, we were like, you're like a great, great, great grandmother. You should be not doing this. Yeah.
You mentioned part of the favorite part of the job is talking with people and interacting with the public and whatnot. And I wondered if you had any advice for budding bear ologist, I guess or who might be interested in, in, you know, following in your footsteps maybe in say 30 years time when you're ready to step down.
[00:52:28] Speaker B: Yeah. So I've got 25 years left before I'll hang it up before I hit retirement age. But in general, if folks want to work on bears, they for sure need a bachelor's from in a wildlife program.
[00:52:43] Speaker B: On the research side, you need to be, you're talking at least a master's degree. It doesn't have to be on bears in general. Sometimes you can find a fully funded program on other things. I did mine on quail, but it teaches you how to be a scientist. And then you, it's mostly just leveraging networking. So you, you know, the bear world is a small world.
You can come to these conferences. There's no bar to entry there.
Most of these bear people are super easy and approachable and love talking about their jobs. It's a super fun, you know, super fun career.
And so that would be my recommendation is make sure you've got your schooling down.
If you have the ability to volunteer, that's great. Not everybody does.
There's a bigger shift now towards paid internships and paid technician positions.
Just because everything is exponentially harder now than it was for my generation or certainly the generations two and three behind or before me. But these jobs will be rare.
You know, in general for state bear biologists, we have 50 states. Of those, 40, some have bears of those, maybe there's one per state.
We're lucky we have two.
Montana has four or five because they have a lot of bears.
And then, you know, the, the, to be honest, one of the other things to think about is maybe A career working with human bear conflict. And so Florida has a really good model where they have lots of conflict biologists that teaches you all that you need to know with interacting with people dealing with human bear conflict. And then you become a known quantity and you can move elsewhere. You know, Florida has produced many of the. The biologists in the east coast right now for the new recruiting class because it's such a really well organized program to work with people and bears at the same time.
[00:54:36] Speaker A: You've mentioned already that you want to work with fish. Any other sort of specific flora, fauna.
If you weren't working with bears, would you be wanting to work with? Or is there one you're passionate about?
[00:54:47] Speaker B: Yeah, so it'd probably be mustelids would be one. So for Minnesota, that's Martin and Fisher and otters, primarily weasels, mink, ermine, that sort of thing. Otherwise it would be moose or caribou.
I'm helping out on a few projects with our new moose and elk biologist and just being able to dip my toes a little bit on the quantity of side health. But they're just impressive animals for sure and super cool to learn about.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I still haven't never seen a moose in Minnesota. I've seen them in Canada, but, yeah, they're quite elusive. I find whenever I'm there.
[00:55:29] Speaker B: For sure. For sure there. And, you know, we only have, you know, 3,600 for the whole Northeast. So, you know, from the sanctuary, going further east will increase your odds. But it's always just by random chance whenever I've seen them.
[00:55:44] Speaker A: Well, I think. Is it a. Oh, God. It's called Echo Trail. I think it's one of these trails. It's out near Ely. That's where people say, oh, if you want to see a moose, go down there. And of course, you never see one when you're looking for it. Yeah.
[00:55:58] Speaker B: Yep. That's my experience as well.
[00:56:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I just had a couple of. Couple of random questions as well for you, if that's all right.
What's the funniest or strangest thing you've seen a bear do?
[00:56:11] Speaker B: Hmm.
Well, when I was in New Jersey, that's kind of when the pedals, the bear situation popped up. And so, you know, a bear walking around on its two hind legs is rather odd.
But that bear made it around just fine.
When I was working out east, one of the bears that we had, there were two bears that showed up. One was collared. They were both eaten out of the dumpster of an Olive Garden and got chased in the parking lot.
And the female ended up in the women's department of the Sears around the corner. And so I have, there's. She made the news, of course. She made the Colbert report and was on, you know, there's a picture of her just like in the vestibule in the department store. But you know, it's the urban stuff I think is probably the strangest where you never know where bears are going to show up.
We have bears that have shown up in downtown St. Paul at the Union train station, and they'll accidentally bump, you know, like spook people that are out hiking or running around, you know, and like in downtown Minneapolis, they're, they're in odd places, but they'll do just fine. I had one female that was collared in West Virginia. She stayed in the little wood lot behind one.
[00:57:26] Speaker B: Behind one development. And it was maybe eight acres of woods, but she stayed there for five years and hardly left that little patch of woods and didn't cause issues, so.
[00:57:35] Speaker A: Oh, well, that's nice. That's nice to hear.
Well, yeah, it's like you say, it's like when you, you see these, like something, it's like when you see anything out of context, isn't it, where you sort of read something where it was like mentioning sloth bears. We, you know, sloth bear visiting a temple in India, just kind of wandering in, going up to the offerings and then wandering out. It's just, it's. And you know, it's just the bear doesn't care. You know, it's just like doing about its business, isn't it?
[00:58:02] Speaker A: And it's funny, funny you mentioned petals because that was like, that was a few years back now, wasn't it?
[00:58:08] Speaker B: Yeah, probably 10 or 15 maybe.
[00:58:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember that being all the news. And then of course the big one was in China where people were looking at sun bears because obviously they were standing on the hind legs. And then they all said, oh, it's a person in a suit. And I mean some bear does look a bit like that. It's, you can't deny it, but it's like, no, no, that is definitely a bear.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Yeah, they're so charismatic and, and you know, they're very.
[00:58:33] Speaker B: In their demeanor. Sometimes it, you know, their closest, one of their closest relatives is dogs. And so they have a lot of that sort of like, you know, medium sized mammal behavior. Very charismatic. And it's, they always show up in places you least expect them. For sure. Yeah.
[00:58:49] Speaker A: No, it's fun. Best movie featuring bears. What would you say?
[00:58:56] Speaker B: I don't know if I have a good answer for that one.
[00:59:01] Speaker B: There is the, one of the first bear movies I ever watched was the Bear which was made by I think a Japanese filmmaker back in the 80s or something and then dubbed into to English back in the VA the early VHS days. But I don't know if I have a favorite. There's, there's a lot of them. My niece is a big fan of the Brother bear series but you know that's cartoony and, and that. So I don't know if I have a good answer for that one.
[00:59:27] Speaker A: Oh, it's all right. Well if you think of something, drop me a. No, it's all right. But just for listeners of the pod as well, I guess what are the sort of main takeaways or messages you'd want to impart to people about sort of bears or the work you do?
[00:59:43] Speaker B: Yeah, so I would say, you know, from an agency biologist perspective, you know, we don't expect everybody to be fully on board with hunting. It can be a controversial thing and it hits everybody's ethics in a different way.
And.
[01:00:02] Speaker B: That for us that's one of the management tools that we use to ensure we among many that we have a healthy sustainable bear population.
And it's one piece of the overall pie. It isn't totally necessary, but it's one of the ways that one of the levers that we have to pull to help folks coexist with bears, it does foster a different appreciation than, than them than people possibly think about.
You know, they aren't here to shoot big trophy animals or something. Like all the hunters that we ever survey, they eat the animal. They're legally required to, to use the meat. You know, you can't just shoot something and let it lay.
[01:00:48] Speaker B: And so that's one piece of our overall bear management. But the other piece is that working with people and, and the COE piece, the bear wise making sure attractants are secured.
You know, bears are, they're not inherently dangerous. We, you know, we don't have to fear them but they are big, large animals and like with everything that we, we do, we want people to respect and, and give the, these large animals the space and, and.
[01:01:17] Speaker B: And respect that they, they truly deserve.
And so what that often means is we have to make some small changes to keep bears wild and coexist with them. Again, that's those bear wise basics. And so put your trash away, put your bird feeders away.
Once bears start down that, that path and become comfortable knocking over trash cans and raiding bird feeders, you Know, it may not seem like a big deal to you, like, I'll just hang it up or it was a cheap bird feeder or something like that.
But over time, what it teaches that bear is often something that we don't want is that people sometimes meet food and, and while you might be tolerant of it, your neighbor probably won't be, you know, in some cases. And in those cases, that's where the bear gets into trouble. It often rarely ends bad for, for anyone but the bear. And so some of the bears that are killed in human bear conflict are a result of, you know, it'd been repeatedly getting food rewards.
It's a very small proportion of our bear population that are killed that way every year. You know, it's generally, you know, less than 50 out of a statewide population that's 18,000. You know, it's remarkably small.
But everybody can do their part to coexist with bears and keep bears out of trouble by just keeping those attract and secured.
[01:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, no, can't agree more.
Was there anything else you wanted to mention or talk about.
[01:02:45] Speaker A: That you think you've got a burning desire to talk about?
[01:02:48] Speaker B: No, I think you hit all the, all the high points. It's just bears are cool. I've got the best job in the agency and I love what I do. Talking about bears is what I do all day, every day.
[01:03:01] Speaker A: Oh, great. Yeah, only a little bit jealous.
[01:03:05] Speaker A: Oh, well, thank you. I mean, I'm like, talk about bears all you want on here. That's what we're here for.
But no, thank you very much, Andy, for coming on. I appreciate you taking the time.
[01:03:16] Speaker B: You bet. Thanks, Phil.
[01:03:17] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's brilliant.
Yeah, well, I suppose I'll cut it there.
[01:03:23] Speaker A: And thanks once again to Andy for joining us in the bear den. There is a link to the bearwise site in the show notes for those that want to learn more. And I can't recommend it enough also because it would keep me up at night thinking about it.
I mentioned the bear Biscuit came in with Cubs in 2017.
I meant to say she came in in 2016 with Cubs and then visited again in 2017, but looked very old and worn out. And that's when we last saw her. So I just had to get that off my chest. Looking ahead in the next episode, I'm joined by Ross Coyer, fifth generation owner of the family run Cabino Pines Resort. So the resort is located just a few miles down the road from the sanctuary and among other things, Ross recounts his memories growing up near the sanctuary and we discuss if being close to the sanctuary affects bear activity at the resort, so we'll catch you there. I'm Philip, this is the Bear Den. Thanks for listening.
[01:04:28] Speaker A: The Bear Den, the American Bear Association Podcast was written and presented by me, Philip Stubley. The music was composed by React Music.
Thank you to everyone who has helped make this podcast possible, including Karen Hauserman, Bill Lee, Clarie Lee, Stephanie Horner, Donna Brzinka, Ross Coyer and Angie Page.
You can find out more about the American bear
[email protected] you can find Vintrudi Wildlife Sanctuary on Facebook and Instagram. You can ask questions and submit comments about the podcast to pswmericanbear.org the ABA is a special circumstance. We do not condone feeding wild animals. If you enjoy this podcast, help support the ABA either by donating, becoming an ABA member, symbolically adopting a bear, or come visit the sanctuary during the season and say hello.
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