Chapter 5: Eyeball to Eyeball
Full, high-resolution color images for Chapter 5: Eyeball to Eyeball.
5.1: Lynn Rogers using a yagi antenna to detect the radio signal from a bear’s collar. The beep-beep-beep signal captured by the antenna flows through a cable to the receiver which he’s holding to his ear (NABC).
5.2: Black bear in den (NABC).
5.3: Black bear in tree den (courtesy NPS.gov, Glacier National Park).
5.4a: Biologist Lisa Bates investigating a tree den in Maine, in partnership with Professor George Matula, Unity College. We did the same thing in Tennessee [Courtesy Grandfather Restoration Project].
5.4b: Black bear in tree den (Frank T. van Manen photo).
5.5: Bear den in the ground (courtesy North American Bear Center).
5.6: Biologist crawling into bear den (courtesy Wisconsin Dept. of Wildlife.
5.7: Nose to nose. When I entered the bear’s den, her head was tucked under, behind her arms out of sight. But when I shoved a hypodermic needle into her rump, her head lifted and she looked right at me. Her nose was so close to my own that she could have licked my face without moving her head – or bitten my face off, had she been so inclined. The sight which greeted me then was similar to this image from the North American Bear Center (Artistic recreation).
5.8: Den-cam image of “Lily” and her cub, at roughly one month old. Footage can be seen on Youtube and at www.bearstudy.org (Courtesy Wildlife Research Institute).
5.9: In the bad old days up through the 1970’s, bears were still kept in concrete compounds which were so barren that they caused severe neurosis if not psychosis. Replacing poured concrete with shotcrete (gunite) carved to simulate rock walls increased aesthetics for humans, but did nothing for bears. However, through the efforts of behavioral biologists like Hal Markotwitz and Else Poulsen (author of Smiling Bears) great strides have been made in making bear compounds much more realistic and psychologically healthy for bears.
5.10: Historic photo of a panhandling black bear being fed from the window of a car – a situation which occasionally resulted in someone being swatted or bitten if the bear became frustrated from being fed too little, too slowly (National Park Service Archives).
5.11: Horace Albright, Yellowstone NP Superintendent 1919 (National Park Service Archives).