Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 5, 1990 TAG: 9006050163
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: DOUG STRUCK BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: SUPERIOR NATIONAL FOREST, MINN. LENGTH: Medium
Like some ancient priest with a sacred wand, he waves a 3-foot antenna over the points of the horizon, seeking the beep from a radio collar on a bear.
The bears are moving, he concludes. He must catch up. Rogers plunges into the Minnesota woods, galloping with antenna held high. He travels straight, oblivious of the terrain. His feet sink into marshes, he crashes through alder thickets, over logs, through aspen stands and blueberry patches, pausing only to call his bears and take another reading.
After a 25-minute chase, he tops a hill, and finds loping toward him a mother black bear and two bear cubs. They are wild, with one important exception: They are accustomed to Rogers.
The cubs climb over him in playful curiosity, and the mother sniffs a few times in interest. Then they are off again to search for grubs, hornets, moose carcass and other edibles.
On many days, Rogers would follow them. He would walk with them, rest with them and record their every move. At night, he would throw down his sleeping bag and snooze right next to them.
Rogers is a biologist with the U.S. Forest Service at its North Central Forest Experiment Station, a cinder-block building 12 miles on the nearest road to Ely, in far northern Minnesota.
He has been studying black bears since he graduated from college in 1967. For two decades, he tracked bears with radio collars from airplanes. The research told him much about their territory and their movements, but little about their everyday lives.
So he decided to live with them.
"I had seen hundreds of bluffs, hundreds of instances of threatening behavior by the bears, but never a follow-through," he related. "Things that I thought were close calls, I started thinking were not really close calls. The bear was close to me, but it had no intention of attacking - just scaring."
"I started thinking that these animals are a lot like gorillas; strong, but basically gentle, timid animals."
He put his theory to test by offering food, and then following the bears back into the woods. The animals were nervous, he said, and would often charge at him in what he now recognizes as a bluff: The bear thumps the ground, lunges to within about 20 feet, lets out a woosh of air and maybe swipes ferociously at a bush for effect.
It's all acting, he says. They have never attacked him.
"In general, I think we've been way too afraid of black bears. We've seen the covers of the outdoor magazines that make them look ferocious, and we've heard over and over again of bear killings. But that's not what they're like."
After he followed the bears for a while, he said, "they decided, he's no problem, just ignore him." But the first night he spent with them was nerve-wracking, he admitted. He could see only dark shapes and shadows of bears passing around him and hear their breathing and bluffing charges.
Now he sleeps next to them. A volunteer assistant, Nancy Bell, woke up last week with a bear cub licking the sleep from her eyes.
When he is with the bears, Rogers constantly enters codes to log the animals' behavior on a small field computer. He records when and how long they are digging, climbing, drinking, resting. He notes every mouthful of their food. He scoops their feces into plastic bags for further analysis in the lab.
In this way, he has compiled a detailed portrait of a bear's everyday life in the woods that has thrilled researchers.
"He has seen things that we have only gotten glimpses of, or speculated on, before," said Al LeCount, a biologist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department and president of the International Bear Association. When Rogers described his work last year to a conference of 100 bear biologists, "they were firing questions at him like a bunch of second-graders. It was exciting."
"All of the professionals were really amazed you could just walk around with them and live with them like he does. Nobody had tried it before Lynn," LeCount said. "Lynn's work is the biggest advancement we have had in black bear work since the coming of age of radio telemetry."
Rogers said he is trying to learn what bears need to survive, so that forest managers can make accommodations as man crowds further into their habitat.
by CNB