Windows on Wildlife: Bear Tracks

Welcome to the 9th edition of Windows on Wildlife! If you have a recent post about wildlife you’d like to share – it can be anything: birds, insects, mammals – scroll down to the end of the post and add your site; a compilation of all additions will be posted the following week. Please don’t forget to [...]

Feeding Bears Leads to Increased Encounters with Wildlife (Duh)

Dear Residents of Northhamption Who Are Feeding Bears, Stop.  Please, just stop. What part of feeding bears seems like a wise decision to you? Is it the fact that they are the largest wild animals here in Massachusetts, or their unpredictable nature that makes this seem like a good idea? Is it the idea of bears tromping through [...]

Tracking Mystery Continued… Sort Of

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the faux bear tracks, I have this ridiculousness to share: My hunter colleague came into the office this morning, and I told him teasingly that he needed to work on his bear tracking skills.  Whoops.  He got pretty ruffled, and insisted that those tracks were indeed from a bear.  To the point where we [...]

Bear Tracks! …Or Not

I phoned my boss the other morning to let him know I was running late coming in, and he was all excited to tell me that one of the staff at our center had found some bear tracks on our property.  I got really excited also – to have the opportunity to do some bear [...]

Hibernating Bears and Living with Predators, Redux

It appears that I – and my handy-dandy mammalogy textbook – were wrong on the bears-not-hibernating front.  According to a fabulous bear resource I found today: www.bear.org (appropriately enough), bears DO hibernate. I know, go figure. Here’s an excerpt from their hibernating fact sheet (they say it far more eloquently than I could): When people [...]

Bears and the Hibernation Myth or, What Bears Really Do in the Woods

I’m sorry to have to be the one to break this to you, but you need to know that bears don’t really hibernate. No, it’s true, they don’t. No, really. Yes, I know that’s what you’ve been told all your life, but I’m here to debunk this myth and shed the light of truth on [...]