Search Results

9941616f-9a89-4ca8-9048-5ecadf20594a Bear Encounters: True Stories to Entertain and Educate Bear Encounters is a collection of stories about the run-ins everyday people have with bears. From the one about the black bear at the cabin that was chased away by the fifteen-pound family dog, to the bear that harmlessly wandered through a Boy Scout camp, these brief and often funny encounters capture the true nature of bears. More than 90 stories have been collected from fans of the North American Bear Center. They include a variety of tales, from routine encounters in backyards, on porches and driveways to sometimes funny and challenging experiences. The stories are grouped into sections around common myths and include anecdotes about how bear encounters have changed people’s views for the better. Read these stories, and you’ll never see bears the same way again. North American Bear Center (compiler) February 22, 2013 128 Pages:

39095857-dc9c-4356-a744-69934e278f24 < Back Slide 34 of 83 < > Larger white pines usually survive because only their tops or individual branches are killed before the tree can stop the disease or someone cuts off the infected branch.

8b66009c-89ea-4097-b5fa-99596f4e5692 < Back < >

93d9f848-200c-4dd4-a272-d65988a46be8 The Bears of Brooks Falls: Wildlife and Survival on Alaska's Brooks River A natural history and celebration of the famous bears and salmon of Brooks River. On the Alaska Peninsula, where exceptional landscapes are commonplace, a small river attracts attention far beyond its scale. Each year, from summer to early fall, brown bears and salmon gather at Brooks River to create one of North America’s greatest wildlife spectacles. As the salmon leap from the cascade, dozens of bears are there to catch them (with as many as forty-three bears sighted in a single day), and thousands of people come to watch in person or on the National Park Service’s popular Brooks Falls Bearcam. The Bears of Brooks Falls tells the story of this region and the bears that made it famous in three parts. The first forms an ecological history of the region, from its dormancy 30,000 years ago to the volcanic events that transformed it into the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. The central and longest section is a deep dive into the lives of the wildlife along the Brooks River, especially the bears and salmon. Readers will learn about the bears’ winter hibernation, mating season, hunting rituals, migration patterns, and their relationship with Alaska’s changing environment. Finally, the book explores the human impact, both positive and negative, on this special region and its wild population. Michael Fitz March 9, 2021 288 Pages:

04bbe5af-6d79-47c3-9016-4f257e77871d BLACK BEAR DIET Tent Caterpillar . June, July Late Spring, Summer In outbreak years, tent caterpillars usually hatch in May and defoliate huge areas. They then pupate in June or early July. As the caterpillars grow, they increase their fat content, and also develop stiff hairs and calcium oxalate crystals that clog digestive tracks, which makes them unpalatable to most animals and birds. Bears eat the caterpillars at this time. No one knows how bears deal with the hairs and crystals as they make these caterpillars their main meal when they are at their fattest. Interestingly, although tent caterpillars provide food for bears in the spring, they reduce food for bears in the summer due to their defoliating berry bushes in June, which reduces berry production in July/August.

f20d7aee-42b8-4e9f-96ff-b85c8ad268b0 < Back Licking Just Before Birth A half an hour before birth she begins licking herself. Previous Next

82c12957-e74f-4d15-ac6d-a43bff2d641e < Back Body Slams During Labor Twelve hours before delivery our mother bear began slamming her body against the side of the den. Previous Next

1b8a07aa-8c33-46e7-8fcc-92a2e57b5307 Smiling Bears, A Zookeeper Explores the Behavior and Emotional Life of Bears Few people have known bears as intimately as Else Poulsen has. This remarkable book reveals the many insights about bears and their emotional lives that she has gained through her years of work with them. Always approaching each bear with the same two questions in mind — "Who are you?" and "What can I do for you?" — Poulsen has shared in the joy of a polar bear discovering soil under her paws for the first time in 20 years and felt the pride of a cub learning to crack nuts with her molars. She has also felt the hateful stare of one bear that she could not befriend, and she has grieved in the abject horror of captivity for a sun bear in Indonesia. Featuring photographs from Poulsen's personal collection, Smiling Bears provides an enlightening and moving portrait of bears in all their richness and complexity. Else Poulsen May 5, 2009 272 Pages:

de777672-a369-4759-9bf6-ff2b42b81a56 Spirit Bear: Encounters With the White Bear of the Western Rainfores Written with vivid detail and passion, Spirit Bear is the story of acclaimed naturalist Charles Russell’s journey to study and learn from the extraordinary spirit bears on the remote Princess Royal Island. From early experiences observing black bears in the Rocky Mountains with his father, the well-known writer and broadcaster Andy Russell, to nerve-racking encounters with grizzlies in British Columbia’s Khutzeymateen Valley, Charles Russell has spent a lifetime studying bears in their natural habitat. In 1991, Russell visited Princess Royal Island, an uninhabited island off the coast of British Columbia. There, amidst the rivers and trees of the western rainforest, he encountered the elusive spirit bear. Known to scientists as the Kermode bear and to the public as the white, ghost, or spirit bear, these extraordinary animals have never been exposed to civilization. In Spirit Bear, Russell recounts his experiences on Princess Royal Island ― trekking over rocks and through streams; waiting hours for the evasive ghost bear to appear; and finally coming face-to-face with a spirit bear only inches from his nose. Illustrated with over 100 stunning colour photographs, Spirit Bear provides beautiful and astonishing insight into the habits and nature of the Kermode bear, and is part of an ongoing effort by conservationists to save Princess Royal Island as a sanctuary for these remarkable animals. Charlie Russell January 1, 1994 144 Pages:

4d920656-1ca5-47c1-9225-7092667a1314 < Back Slide 70 of 83 < > When cubs have to stay up trees for hours to escape danger, it's important in spring in northern Minnesota that the tree be a white pine that can give shade instead of a deciduous tree that doesn't have any leaves yet because even on cool days, the sun can make cubs' black fur so hot they can die if they can't find shade.

969e6a3c-6f8f-4196-b7ea-0a79fbcec657 < Back Slide 56 of 83 < > Finally, is it important to keep white pines for wildlife? U.S. Forest Service studies showed that as scarce as white pines are, they still hold 80% of the eagle nests and 77% of the osprey nests in the Superior National Forest. These birds seek out white pines that strongly.

August 26, 1985 Ed Orazem: The Man Who Feeds the Bears Ely Echo, Aug. 26, 1985, by Nick Wognum There have been a lot of problems with bears in and around Ely this year, tipping over garbage cans and getting into gardens, but south of town, on Armstrong Lake the bears just aren’t interested in causing problems. The main reason is that the bears are being served at an outdoor restaurant, owned and operated by Ed Orazem. This may seem hard to believe, since the connotation of a bear usually doesn’t bring pleasant thoughts to the average person. Stories this summer have ranged from campers having their food packs ripped apart to bears taking a stroll right through Ely. Ed Orazem saw the same thing happen back in 1968, except that he decided to do something about it. It seems that a hungry bear had started digging in his neighbor’s garbage cans, and the neighbor was pretty fed up with the bear and decided to do something about it. Ed asked the neighbor if he could have a little time to cure the bear of his bad habits, and he set out to keep the bear from getting so hungry by keeping him fed. That is when Ed’s Outdoor Restaurant began. There was a picnic table a ways away from his house, and Ed would take food scraps and fish innards, set them on the table and watch as the big black bear would come and feed at night. “And then, a little at a time,” Ed said with a big smile on his wrinkled face, “I would get closer and closer. He started to trust me and at the same time he quit going to the garbage cans.” That was many years ago, but Orazem has plenty of tales to tell about the bears he has fed over the years, and every story ends with rolling laughter from the face that has seen many years pass by. How old is Ed? “Too many,” he says; “I just seen another birthday…if the next one comes as fast I’ll grow to be an oldman -like an old hickory stick.” And the laughter comes through again as he begins fixing an evening meal for his outdoor guests. “Deedee and Bobo I call them, been feeding them since they were twin cubs in ’82. They’re close to four years old now.” He starts another story about when they were cubs and they would come with the mama bear. “You see, during the first year the cubs eat first, but the mama would be there watching me. When they came back the second year, the mother ate first and the cubs waited. It seemed that the cubs were on their own after the first year.” Ed has learned plenty about the bears’ habits, and he’d rather talk about that than the cancer that had him in the hospital for 5 1/2 months a year and a half ago and for another 13-week stint this last winter. Ed has a feel for animals, talking to them as he fills up the bird feeders near his trailer home or as he strings up suet on the trees for the little animals to eat A family of chipmunks has moved into his woodpile and as the younger ones scutter about picking up the fallen birdseed, an older chipmunk gnaws the fat intended for the bears. Then it’s back inside to wait for his customers. Their small table is reserved and the food is warming in the frying pan. Cooking on the stove are pieces of suet in bacon grease, and to top it off, Ed will make this one a real feast. ”I’m not selfish, I’ll put an egg in there…one less for breakfast…that’s O.K. I like to share, just like with people.” This may sound like an expensive hobby, but Ed contradicts that. He gets meat scraps from the grocery stores in town and picks up the stale food from the bakery, “for dessert.” Not for himself, of course, but for his furry guests. When the egg is done (sunny-side up), Ed takes the hot food outside and sets it on the small wooden table that sits ten feet away from his window and covers it with another metal frying pan. But this is not done quietly. Ed bangs the pans together, whistling as a person would whistle for his dog, and he calls out, “Deedee, come on, time to eat!” This may sound a little out of the ordinary, and Ed would be the first to admit to that. “I bellow out to my friends,” he says with a grin. “My neighbors must be wondering, but I think: they feed the bears, too.” As he continues to tell stories about his experiences with bears, he keeps a watchful eye out the window, waiting for his friends to come. Ed lives alone, and he lights up when he hears Deedee coming through the woods for her dinner. “You can’t teach them what hours to eat. They don’t care if it’s now (about six o’clock p.m.) or midnight, but a lot of the time you can’t teach people that, either. And they don’t say, ‘Hey, Ed, I’m here!’ They just take their time in coming.” Orazem sits back and retells another incident when he had been watching a ballgame on TV and fell asleep. He had put the suet in the entryway, and was awakened by a bear peeking into his living room after prying the screen door open. “Whoa, did he give me a scare, but as soon as I moved, that bear was out the door and running. I must have scared him, too.” Through the side window, we see a big black object slowly making its way toward the trailer. It looks almost as if the bear is hopping; Ed explains why: “That’s Deedee. She got her right front leg caught in a trap, it’s broken right here (he points to an area on his arm just above his wrist). She was gone for three weeks last year when that happened so now she kind of walks with a limp.” Bobo didn’t come that night but Ed said that he had been shot twice when he was a cub. Bobo has a white stripe underneath his neck, and the bullet had cut into the white part. Now it looks as if the stripe had been cut in half and not put back together straight. Orazem is against anybody shooting a bear if it’s just rummaging in someone’s garbage. He has been asked many times if he has ever shot a bear, and his answer is always the same: “I say I hunt them with that there (pointing), yeah, I shot him with a camera.” Then he pulls out the close to a hundred pictures he has taken over the years. His favorite is of Deedee with her nose right up to the lens of the camera; the picture came out with Deedee appearing to have a foot-long snout. After a while, Deedee figures it’s safe to come in, so she limps over to the seven foot high dead birch tree that Ed uses as a feeding post, putting nails up near the top and tying bits of meat onto them. Deedee reaches up the tree, takes the piece of meat and ambles back off into the woods to eat and druther over the situation. With a bit of enticing from Orazem, she limps around to the side of the trailer only to find an eager stranger (the reporter) in her dining room. As soon as his smell hit her nose she was off and limping back to the safety of the trees. We decided to wait a while, since, as Ed reasoned, her hunger would probably get the best ofher. After a few more tries, the still wary full grown bear came up to the lawn chair where Ed was sitting with the frying pan full of grub. I stood still, and then moved slowly to take a picture. Deedee saw the movement and again backed off in fear. With some more coaxing from Ed, however, she came back and accepted the fact that she and Ed would not be dining alone tonight. Ed has trained Deedee since she was a cub, and the respect they have for each other is obvious. He made no effort to pet the bear, saying, “It’s not that touching the fur is something you want to do; it’s how close you can get to them, that shows how much they trust you.” The trust runs deep in Deedee. Ed pulled the food back and told her to sit, and sure enough, she did. After rewarding her with a cookie, he had her stand on her hind legs and held another cookie as high as he could reach. Deedee took the prize gingerly as Ed laughed at her antics. “The way their posture is, it’s just like a monkey or a human being.” Orazem has a hollow log near the small table that he feeds the bears on. He says his favorite pose of her is when she leans on the log with one paw as if she is sitting in a bar waiting for a drink. The only drink she got from Ed the Chef that night was some powdered milk poured into a bowl with some stale powdered donuts added. After she had finished dessert, we went back inside. “You know,” he said, looking at Deedee through the kitchen window, “living out in the sticks isn’t so bad. People ask me why I feed bears. I guess if there was something interesting on TV instead of all those soap operas it’d be different, but I do it for myself…how many people have the opportunity to do what I do?”