Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 16, 1990 TAG: 9003192668
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By Cathryn McCue
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Baby bears are not cute.
There are three of them on Virginia Tech property this winter, part of wildlife professor Mike Vaughan's research on black bear reproduction.
Two-week-old cubs bear little resemblance to the mighty beasts they are destined to become. They're scrawny, almost hairless, their head disproportionately large and their eyes shut tight.
They don't growl or roar when disturbed, but instead produce a racket of screeching and squealing that can drown out normal conversation. When nursing, Vaughan said, they make a sound like a bees in a hive.
Despite their size, the cubs can put up quite a fight. It took two of Vaughan's assistants to measure the squirming critters when each was less than a pound and tiny enough to fit into a small shoebox.
"They're hard to handle when they get up to 10 and 15 pounds," Vaughan noted. "They're just teeth and claws."
A few weeks ago, a reporter and photographer accompanied Vaughan and several assistants into the mother bear's cage - after he'd shot her full of tranquilizers.
Still, it took more than a scrap of faith in veterinary medicine to kneel next to a full grown mama bear, hold her paw, feel her claws, scratch her ears and sink a hand into six inches of thick, soft fur.
She could probably hear her cubs protesting the intrusion, but was too drugged to move, Vaughan said. "I wouldn't want her to wake up with all this going on. I don't know what she'd do."
Each bear has a distinct personality, said Vaughan, who has worked four years with captive bears. The mother "was mellow when she first came and then she became more aggressive. I don't know why that is. She's a wild bear."
Vaughan does his work quickly, hoping the bears will stay wild by limiting the time they are exposed to humans. Leaving the cage, he makes sure no one steps in the nest the bear has made in the straw.
In the wild, bears will den in any number of places, said Dennis Martin, bear specialist with the state Game Department.
"They've been known to climb as high as 90 feet" up a hollow tree and drop down inside to den in the bottom. He said he once took a 300-pound bear out of a space so small even he - a 150-pound man - couldn't have crawled into it.
Some bears make huge nests out of grass and twigs high in trees, or dig a small depression in the ground, exposed to the elements all winter, where they bear and nurse cubs.
It's not unusual for male bears to wander into populated areas, and not necessarily in search of food. Males help control the bear population by chasing younger males out of breeding areas, and sometimes killing cubs, Vaughan said.
"There's a lot of concern about the population of bears now, with a lot of the agricultural activities and cutting down of forests," he said.
One bear wandered into Blacksburg a couple of years ago and was finally captured in a back yard on Draper Street. One of Vaughan's graduate students happend to live in the house and had studied that very bear as part of a research project in the Dismal Swamp of eastern Virginia the year before.
Vaughan said a Shenandoah National Park bear once was chased by older males all the way to Baltimore - more than 100 miles as the crow flies.
Other bear facts:
Wildlife experts determine a bear's age by yanking a tooth and counting the rings.
Bears don't eat, drink, urinate or defecate during hibernation, which can last up to seven months.
They remain semi-alert and know if intruders are near.
Their kidneys shut down and their bones continue to produce marrow and remain strong. These phenomena are being studied by biologists for application to human medicine.
They breed every other summer. When an embryo has grown to about 300 cells, it ceases to develop and floats in the uterus.
The eggs implant around the first week of December; gestation lasts about two months.
two bear species live in North America: the grizzly and the American black bear, which may have brownish or blondish fur in the Western states. - CATHRYN McCUE
by CNB