Dog Days Bearing Down

Hard to bear our dog days during August -- especially when you're wearing a thick fur coat. But this youngster beat the heat today by relaxing in the cool waters of a Glacier Park beaver pond.

Mother and Son

Mother and son stop eating grass to watch more cars approach

Black bears were out in the open this morning, grazing on the first green, roadside grass. This is when it's critical that the rangers scare them away, before the tourists arrive. A handful of chips or half a sandwich, tossed out the car window, is almost always a death sentence for a roadside bear. Don't approach and don't feed. When there aren't other people on the road, I do what the rangers do - rev the engine while honking the horn and yelling. You just might save a cute cub's life that way.

Bear Diets

Canine teeth visible on a young grizzly bear eating spring forbs and grass

Those big canine teeth that you see featured in so many stuffed bears are seldom used by wild and free bears. This time of year, you're more likely to see bears gulping berries.

Canines are mostly useful for tearing into hide and pulling off chunks of meat, which any bear is happy to do on the few occasions that it catches an old or weak animal, or follows its nose to the recently deceased.

But meat is an infrequent menu item for grizzlies and a rare treat for black bears. They eat mostly plants, and bears have to eat LOTS of plant matter because they lack the herbivores' specialized digestive tract. Within this mostly vegetarian diet, the plant species eaten by Montana bears vary considerably between seasons and regions.

SPRING

Bears resume eating 1-2 weeks after emerging from their winter dens. Grizzlies head for the avalanche chutes to sniff out the frozen carcasses of goats and sheep. Yellow hedysarum roots (Hedysarum sulphurescens) are also sought out by grizzlies in the North Fork of the Flathead. But across the Continental Divide, whitebark pine nuts (Pinus albicaulis), sniffed out and dug up from squirrel caches, are important for the East Front grizzlies and those living down in Yellowstone. Yellowstone grizzlies will prey on wobbly elk calves and injured bison bulls during the rut. They'll also appropriate wolf-killed carrion any time of year, but it is especially valuable in spring.

The black bears' curved claws are excellent for climbing trees, but not very good for digging in snow or rocks. So black bears spend most of the spring seeking out succulent, spring vegetation, especially horsetail (Equisetum spp.) and dandelions (Taraxacum spp.). For the first few days after sprouting, young plants are relatively high in protein and low in indigestible cellulose. And plants at higher elevations grow faster with less cellulose than those at lower elevations. Both species of bears follow the spring green-up uphill, and move from south-facing to north-facing slopes as the season progresses, maximizing the protein content of their chosen food plants.

Bears lack the multi-chambered stomachs of ruminants, like elk, and the enlarged cecum of rodents, like beavers, that enable these herbivores to break down and digest plant cellulose. But when compared to other carnivores, bears have an elongated digestive tract that makes them more efficient as plant eaters.

SUMMER


Black bear eating summer grass

Early summer can be an especially hard time for both bear species. Avalanche chutes and meadows are drying out, vegetation is older and less digestible, most berries aren't ripe yet, and by mid-July the elk calves run too fast for grizzlies to catch. Grizzlies and black bears are forced to eat lots of low-value summer plants, trying to stave off starvation just a little bit longer. Summer is also bear mating season. But if a female is unable to gain enough weight between now and hibernation, the summer embryos will not implant in early winter, and she will not have cubs next spring.

Both species eat lots of summer grasses and sedges and clover (Trifolium spp.) in all areas occupied by bears. Cow parsnip (Heracleum lanatum) rises in importance for grizzlies in the Flathead, while Yellowstone grizzlies take advantage of cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii) spawning in shallow waters of several streams.

Both bear species also add insects to their diets as the bugs become more numerous in summer. Ants, bees, yellowjackets, grubs and beetles become increasingly important additions to the reduced menu of late-emerging plants. Bears will even spend the energy to eat earthworms.

Later in summer, groups of grizzly bears gather on rocky mountain tops in Glacier, Yellowstone and the Missions to lick up masses of army cutworm moths (Euxoa auxiliaris) hiding underneath the rocks. Moths by the millions migrate to Montana's meadows and mountain tops from farmland states many miles to the east and south, where the larval caterpillars are serious agricultural pests. A hungry bear can eat 20,000 to 40,000 of these adult moths each day, downing a whopping 300,000 calories in just 30 days - which is about 25% of the total calories they need to survive for one year. (Excellent video here, shortened version here.)

Lower down, black bears are eating lots of ants and plants. For many black and grizzly bears, mid to late summer is when they finally stop loosing weight and start putting on fat. Berry season has finally arrived!

AUTUMN

A multitude of wild Montana fruits begins ripening in late summer and comes on strong in early fall. Currents, gooseberries, cranberries, bilberries, kinnikinnick, salmonberries and blackberries, among many others. But this is first and foremost a feast upon two berries, huckleberries in the west and buffaloberries in the east.

Huckleberries (Vaccinium  spp.) grow in thick patches in the (west side) North and South Forks of the Flathead, where all of the local bears gather and gorge. As huckleberries begin to diminish, mountain ash berries (Sorbus sitchensis) rise in importance. The primary berry east of the divide is buffaloberry (Shepherdia canadensis), which begins ripening in mid-August. During peak season, bears living east of the divide can consume 50,000 to 200,000 buffaloberries each day.

In the Mission Mountains, grizzly bears have also learned to eat domestic apples and plums. Orchard owners must remove any remaining fruit by fall, else the bears will break off branches while climbing row after row of valuable trees. Down in Yellowstone, some grizzlies turn their attention to bull elk that become weakened or injured during the fall rut.

WINTER

Bears often forage 20 hours a day in fall, adding as much as 35% to their body weight in preparation for winter hibernation. Between October and April, bears rest in snow-covered dens while their main foods are scarce or absent. In addition to females giving birth and nursing while asleep, something else takes place during hibernation that's almost as amazing.

A hibernating bear burns almost as many calories as an active bear. A bear's body temperature only drops by 3-5F degrees, and its heart rate reduces by about 35%. It doesn't eat or drink (or defecate or urinate). A bear survives strictly by burning fat, not muscle. Bears are also able to recycle nitrogenous waste urea back into protein. The ability to survive for 5-7 months while burning roughly 4,000 calories each day during hibernation is truly an amazing feat. Perhaps we should feel more impressed by the marvels of hibernation and become less preoccupied with those big, canine teeth.


Black bear sow with three cubs feasting in a patch of low-growing kinnikinnick berries during fall

Bearberry Bears

A black bear family plucks little red berries from a patch of bearberrry in Glacier National Park.

Montana's bears usually begin denning up with the first mountain snowstorms in October. Reaching towards mid-November now, and we still haven't had a major snow. Scanning the Glacier Park webcams (permanent link in right-hand column) currently shows that all of the park's valley bottoms are still snow-free. This may be good news for bears.

Open slopes in late-fall means that some bears can stay out a little later and pack on a little more fat to survive the winter with. Food preferences vary somewhat between individuals and substantially between regions. In late summer and early fall, Glacier's west side bears rely heavily on huckleberries, while east side bears rely more on whitebark pine nuts and buffaloberry. But in the fall, both groups of bears feed on kinnikinnick berries (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi).

One ripe bearberry

Kinnikinnick's other common name is "bearberry," and for good reason.

In recent weeks, we've seen lots of bears feasting on a good bearberry crop along the lower slopes, on the east side of Glacier. While the black bear family (above) was moving from one clump of bearberry to another, other bears on the mountain were doing the same.

Just around the ridge to the east, a very obese, lone black bear (a boar?) was very preoccupied gorging on the little red berries. High up and farther west on the same slope, a lone grizzly bear spent most of the evening feeding in what looked (through binoculars) like bearberry patches. Across the valley to the south, another big black bear studied the other bears for a while before climbing down the ridge and crossing the creek just before dark - heading for the bearberry patches?

Bears hibernate because it prevents a net energy loss. At some point, the amount of calories gained from eating plants is less than the amount required to find food that's buried under snow. From south to north, the length of bear hibernation increases from a few weeks to a few months. But until we get a really good snowstorm, some of Montana's bears seem to be staying up late.

Fall Foraging for Winter Survival

They've been waiting all summer for this. It's fall in the higher elevations, and the wild woodland berry crops are hitting their peak. And that means our black bears are eating berries non-stop, putting on fat and getting ready for winter.

Montana's black bears will den up in a month or two. Until then, they'll feast on berries and consume five times more calories than in summer time, when they ate red ants and green plants. In years with good berry crops, bears will add up to five inches of fat to will help them through hibernation. In years of poor berry crops, bears will search for any kind of alternative food to survive. And this is when our human carelessness (with trash, bird feeders and dog food) creates death traps for desperate black bears. Keep your home in order, and our native black bears will do the same.

Historic Horsetail

What can we learn from a family of plants that is 400 million years old? After all, the ancient horsetail (Equisetum spp.) has hardly changed during its long history with dinosaurs, humans and bears. What do we really know about this common native plant?



Vegetative stem (left) and strobulus (right)

 FAMILY HISTORY

Equisetum (from the Latin equus "horse" + seta "bristle") is the only living descendant from a group of plants that once dominated the Paleozoic forests. The horsetail family was a successful group long before the rise and fall of dinosaurs. Some of their ancestors lived with early dragonflies that had 2.5 foot wingspans. These ancient horsetails were many of the plants that died and slowly compressed into the coal that we dig up and use today.

Modern day horsetails are smaller, 2" to 14" tall plants that often favor wet areas. There are at least seven species native to Montana.

Most of each horsetail plant lives deep in the ground. A large underground rhizome sprouts two different kinds of above-ground stems: brown and green. Pale brown spore-bearing stems ("strobulus") arise in spring, followed by the familiar green vegetative stems with their wispy whirled branches.

Below the visible stems, underground rhizomes grow more than six feet deep. (This is why pulling, plowing and burning have little or no effect.) At one-foot intervals, the rhizomes branch out sideways and grow food-storing tubers.

Most reproduction is by asexual sprouts from the rhizomes. Horsetails don't produce flowers. For sexual reproduction the horsetail grows brown, spore-bearing stems during May and June.

The spore-bearing strobulus is a pale brown cone because it lacks chlorophyll. The tiny spores start out as male and female gametes, but over time the female spores also grow male parts, resulting in male and bisexual gametes. The gametes are less than 0.016 inches tall, only a few cells thick, and short-lived. Male sperm must travel through water to reach an egg-bearing female part, so sexual reproduction is thought to be rare in horsetails.

As the brown cone stems start to shrivel, the familiar green stems begin to elongate. The whirls are actually slender branches, and the tiny leaves have been reduced to small brown scales around the stem.



Whirls of small, brown leaves and long green branches

As horsetail matures, abrasive silica crystals form in the stems and branches, and a new group of neighbors found this trait to be quite useful.

HUMAN USES

Long after the horsetail ancestors saw the giant dragonflies and dinosaurs come and go, humans appeared on the scene. Horsetail has a long history of medicinal and practical uses by humans. Written, herbal horsetail remedies date back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Native Americans also made wide use of horsetail for food and medicine. Crow and Flathead Indians used it as a diuretic, and the Blackfeet boiled it to make cough medicine for horses. Cree and Crow Indians used horsetail to relieve abdominal pains.

Natives and early settlers ate the young horsetail shoots raw or cooked, like asparagus. They also drank a diuretic tea brewed from horsetail, and made green dyes for lodges and clothing.

The rough silica crystals made dried horsetail a favorite tool for scouring and polishing. Settlers gathered bundles of horsetail and used them to scour floors and polish metal, especially pewter. Some Native Americans still use horsetail to polish ceremonial pipes, as well as bows and arrows. Indian children even made whistles from the hollow horsetail stems -- a use that was echoed by early Europeans.

BEARS & HORSE TALES

Green horsetail shoots are 15% protein by dry weight. But eating too much horsetail can be poisonous to its namesake -- horses. While Captain Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) noted that, "the horses are remarkably fond of it," horsetail can cause paralysis and death in horses. It is seldom eaten by other livestock, and deer and elk avoid it as well.

Bears, on the other hand, love the stuff.

Bears stay alive by eating their vegetables. The most important bear foods are forbs in spring (horsetail, clover, dandelions), ants in summer, and berries in the fall. For most bears, meat is just an occasional bonus. Plants and ants stave off starvation until the bears can fatten up on fall berries.

For Montana's grizzlies, forbs are important throughout the bears' active period. In spring, horsetail is the bears' favorite food across northwestern Montana. In summer, horsetail ranks 10th out of 32 food items eaten by grizzly bears in the southeastern corner we call Yellowstone.



Horsetail growing in water

 The menu is similar for black bears in Banff, north of Montana. In two studies, horsetail comprised 38% and 34% of spring black bear diets. During summer, horsetails were the second-most sought after food item, after ants.

Bear diet and habitat use both change with plant availability. Bears start at low elevation sites in spring and follow plant development to higher elevations in summer. In this way, bears eat horsetails that are in their immature, most nutritious stages, relatively higher in soluble nutrients and lower in fiber than mature plants.

LESSONS LEARNED

Horsetail has survived many millions of years longer than humans. These plants managed to hang on during periods of mass extinction and global climate change. In the process, they grew their roots deep and helped their neighbors fend off illness and starvation. Can we learn any lessons from this ancient family?

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Black Bear Secrets

Wildlife Biology student volunteers at the National Bison Range

Volunteering can give birth to some unexpected encounters.

To avoid bison encounters, you are required to stay by your car when touring the National Bison Range -- unless you're a bunch of greenhorn wildlife biology students who volunteer to work during spring break. One chilly morning twenty-something years ago, two truckloads of us lumbered up Red Sleep Mountain, starting at the top so we could fan out and hike downhill in all directions.

Our job? Count how many deer, elk and sheep survived winter on the Range. My assignment was to hike along this skinny ridge, and then drop down into its steep draw, on down the mountain to the perimeter road and the rendezvous truck.

Black bear den at Nat. Bison Range

The sunny ridge would soon transform into a wildflower nursery, but on that blustery day the shaded draw was slick with brown grasses and loose rocks. I angled back and forth across the slope, choosing a route that compromised between good visibility and decent footing. Partway down, the roots of a fallen ponderose pine had pushed up a small patch of level ground. It looked like a good place to stop and catch my breath.

Reaching the roots, I almost lost my breath instead.

Black bear peering out of its den

In a small hole under the tree, two brown eyes peered back at me. Black bear, still in its winter den. The bear was lying in a thick bed of brown grasses, and it's head was slowly shaking back and forth, like an old, old man. I apologized for my intrusion, grabbed two quick frames with the camera around my neck, and headed downhill. When I finally reached the truck, no one believed me at first. But I had the evidence.

Black bear hibernation varies by latitude and by sex, from just a few weeks (down in Mexico) to 5-6 months up here in Montana. The bigger boars will start surfacing here again in April, but the last ones out of their winter dens will be the sows with new cubs.

A black bear sow breeds in summer, but she delays embryonic implantation until December -- one or two months after she dens up. Her cubs are born in late January or early February. They arrive naked and blind in the middle of winter, and they do not hibernate. They'll nurse and grow fast, keeping warm by cuddling with mom. Tipping the birth scales at 8-12 ounces (224-336g) and 8 inches (20 cm) long, the youngsters will emerge three months later at a flyweight 4-8 pounds. (Grizzly cubs emerge at about twice that weight.) Slightly more than one-third of western Montana's black bear cubs will survive their first year.

Our black bears are comparative light-weights, which shows the difficulty they have finding enough food. Males in the northwest average about 175-200 pounds, while acorn-fattened eastern bears can weigh up to 600-800 pounds. Bears living in the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area, north of Missoula, have learned to come into town at night to harvest apples in the fall. But in winter, about the only way to beat starvation is by hibernating.

Black bears get ready for hibernation during the fall feeding frenzy, when they'll consume five times more calories and build up a five inch layer of fat. In late fall, these fat cells secrete an appetite-diminishing hormone, leptin, and the bears gradually stop eating. They'll enter the den on empty stomachs without the pangs of hunger. In spring, leptin levels decrease and hunger returns.

Just how they metabolize those fat cells is one of the secrets to bear hibernation.

People can survive a long time on body fat alone. But metabolism generates nitrogen, which our bodies convert into toxic urea, and so we must continually drink and excrete water to get rid of nitrogen. If we stopped drinking, we would die of dehydration. If we stopped urinating, we would become poisoned by our own metabolic wastes.

Bears, on the other hand, don't drink or urinate in winter. Their winter metabolism also creates nitrogen, but their bodies recycle that nitrogen into muscle and organ tissues. They do generate a small amount of urea, but they convert it into non-toxic creatine. No toxins produced means no need to drink or urinate while denning.

Another secret to bear hibernation is how they maintain bone density while remaining inactive for months on end. Human astronauts quickly loose bone mineral content in space, unless they exercise, and paraplegics lose 30% of pre-injury bone mass. How does a bear that sleeps for five months prevent bone density loss? We don't exactly know.

But some previously hidden hibernation secrets are slowly coming into view -- potentially including the birth of black bear cubs.

A bear research group in Ely, Minnesota has installed a live, web-streaming camera at the den site of "Lily," one of their research bears. Lily is three years old and thought to be pregnant. While she's not a Montana bear, and not exactly wild, she might give us the opportunity to watch the world's first live bear birth. You can check in on Lily by clicking here.

If Lily does have cubs, then you might just find that watching them grow in their winter den is an irresistable, unexpected bear encounter.

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1/22/10 UPDATE

Lily the black bear is now a mom.

Lily gave birth to a single cub on Friday, January 22nd, after more than 21 hours of labor. Now she's alternating her time between sleeping and and feeding her tiny cub. We should be able to watch the cub grow up in the den for the next two to three months. It will be fascinating to watch as Lily lifts the veil on more black bear secrets.

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3/31/10 UPDATE

Lily and Hope left their den today. You can still read updates on their progress and watch video highlights at the link above.

Middle Midden Managers

It might be easy to miss the red squirrel's role in the big scheme of things. But it is persistence that makes her one of the main "movers and shakers" in Montana's coniferous forests. Her eight-ounce presence impacts everything from bears to birds, and even the forest itself.

Red squirrels (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) are solitary except during breeding. Each adult defends a territory that contains two critical features; several grass nests built on branches or in tree hollows, and one or more food caches called "middens."

Mother squirrels normally give birth once a year to 3-4 helpless, hairless young. The young won't even venture from the nest during their first month, and they'll nurse for more than two months, but they'll reach adult size in just four months.

The youngsters need to grow fast, because they must establish their own territory before winter arrives; only one in four will survive until spring. At most, they only live 6-7 years, so the key to survival lies buried in those traditional midden sites.

Red squirrels specialize in harvesting and eating the seeds that are stored in the cones of spruce, fir and pine trees. They may cut and cache two-thirds of the yearly seed crop produced in an area. In a poor cone-production year, one red squirrel territory may only grow enough cones to provide half the annual energy needed by that squirrel.

In captive experiments, red squirrels needed to eat 125 (new) to 175 (year-old) spruce cones per day to survive, when no other food was provided. Wild squirrels are not too picky and they'll also eat mushrooms, fruit, nuts, insects, buds and bark. But the conifer cone seeds are their first choice.

So in the fall, these hard-working squirrels cut down and cache the extra cones that they will eat all winter. Lots of cones. In one study, between 12,000 and 16,000 per year, per squirrel. Each of their middens might contain many hundreds of cones. If extra cones accrue each year, the middens will eventually store enough food to get the squirrel through one or maybe even two winters in years of bad cone crops. These mega-middens can measure several feet across.

And bigger middens mean fatter bears.

Black and grizzly bears regularly raid the red squirrel middens, especially if they are stocked with the cones of white bark pines. These pine nuts are almost one-half fat, and the bears will eat them almost exclusively in the fall of a good crop year (September - November), and again the following spring (March - May). Black bears sometimes climb the trees to break off cone-bearing branches, but black and grizzly bears get almost all of their white bark pine nuts by digging up red squirrel middens.

Grizzly bears also eat the nuts from limber pine cones along the eastern front of Montana's Rocky Mountains, but not in Yellowstone. In one study area, the Yellowstone wildfires in 1988 burned about one-half of the white bark pine stands. Afterwards, there were about one-third fewer red squirrel middens, the middens were soon only half as big, and the number of bear excavations fell by about one-half in the years that followed.

That's a big impact. But these little red squirrels impact more than just bears.

Pine martens in Yellowstone were twice as likely to use "subnivean" (under the snow) areas that included red squirrel middens. In nearby Wyoming, the most important selection variable for marten den locations was the presence of middens.

Up here in western Montana, red squirrels were identified as the second-most common prey item for Canada lynx during winter (although weight-wise, snowshoe hares accounted for 96% of lynx diet).

Red squirrels are also a regular menu item for some forest raptors, like Great-horned Owls and Northern Goshawks. One Goshawk researcher found red squirrel bones in more than half of the pellets regurgitated by the hawks. But when it comes to songbirds, it's the red squirrels who are doing the dining.

Red squirrels can eat a lot of the eggs and chicks in the nests of smaller birds. In lodgepole pine forests, songbird species that nest high up in the tree canopy are two to three times more abundant in stands that don't have red squirrels. Birds that nest in tree cavities don't seem to be impacted.

These busy squirrels also impact individual trees, and even the forest itself.

Because some seed caches are never eaten, red squirrels are a key tree planter and seed disperser. They also harvest mushrooms, drying them up in tree limbs (in the wind) to save for eating in winter.

Many of these mushrooms are the fruits of mycorrhizal fungi that grow around the trees' roots and help the trees absorb water and minerals. A mushroom hanging out in the branches becomes an over-achiever, spreading its spores much farther than it could at ground level.

In forest types that burn frequently, like lodgepole pine, the little red squirrels can alter post-fire seedling rates, which in turn can impact the course of forest succession. Lodgepole pines produce two kinds of cones, regular and "serotinous." Serotinous cones are covered in resin and do not release their seeds until the resin is melted by fire.

This is a great fire adaptation, until a seed predator moves in and eats most of the seeds that are stored in the canopy, in those serotinous cones. Lodgepole pine stands in the Rockies that don't have red squirrels consistently bear nearly 100% serotinous cones. But the stands with squirrels average less than 50% serotinous cones.

Forests and forest birds, pine trees and pine martens, black bears and grizzly bears. The hard-working red squirrel impacts each of these natives. Separately, each interaction might be easy to miss. But a wider view lets us see how the persistence of this pint-sized squirrel fits into the bigger picture -- one pine cone at a time.

Behind the lens: This red squirrel (above) strategically positioned itself on a branch that was awash in a morning sunbeam -- an energy-effecient way to warm up in the morning, if your hands are too small to hold a cup of coffee. Nikon D700, 500mm f4 lens on monopod.

Bear Dreams

The Big Dipper is often portrayed as the tail of Ursa Major, the "Great Bear" constellation. And in October, when the Great Bear's tail dips down to its lowest point in the midnight sky, it is time for grizzly bears to head below ground.

Most bears stop eating in winter because it is more efficient to sleep than it is to plow through snow, digging for dwindling supplies of plants and berries. The calories spent searching would outnumber the calories gained by eating.

Some interesting exceptions occur in Glacier and Yellowstone parks, where wolves have returned. Some bears have learned to spend the winter awake, actively usurping and scavenging deer and elk meat from wolf and lion kills. Nowadays, this is exceptional behavior, but it might have been the norm back when bears and wolves lived with few if any human neighbors.

In early fall, adult bears prepare for winter by digging one or more dens into steep, north-facing slopes above 6,000 feet elevation. A short, narrow tunnel slopes downward to a larger resting chamber that is often lined with grasses and leaves, and the excavation may measure up to 12 feet in length.

Grizzly sows are the first to den up, followed by the bigger boars about a month later. The bears often wait for a major snowstorm before heading up the mountain. This timing not only hides their tracks, it also covers the den opening and buries it in an insulating blanket of snow. Down at the bottom of their lair, the ground temperature stays above freezing.

For the rest of winter, the bears survive on energy metabolized from the summer's fat layer under their thick fur. While the great bear sleeps, its body temperature falls a few degrees, the heart rate slows to 8-12 beats per minute, and oxygen consumption drops by half. It does not eat, drink, urinate or defecate. Still, this is not true hibernation, and the bear remains alert and can awaken easily. They might even move to another one of their dens mid-winter, but they typically don't re-use dens that were dug in previous years.

During the winter, pregnant sows give birth and begin nursing their one-pound cubs with milk; this caloric balancing act is simultaneously complex and graceful. Young bears that survive the summers will den again with their mothers during the next two winters. In the third year, the sow will be ready to mate again.

Big boars are the first to emerge, usually by March or April, weighing 30% less than they did when entering their dens. Sows with cubs will rise about a month later, giving the young bears more time to grow a little bigger before climbing out into a new world.

By late spring, the Great Bear constellation has climbed back up to its highest point in the evening sky, and Montana's great bears are back on top of the food chain -- right where they belong.

Behind the lens: While photographing these bears in Glacier Park, I noticed that the front of my lens was dotted with water droplets where snowflakes had skipped across. Subsequently, each image was blurrier than the one before. Lens hoods are helpful, but now days I also keep a dry towel around my neck when working in rain or snow.

Also please note, this photograph was taken from the safety of my truck. I never approach bears, and neither should you.  If one of us gets mauled, the bear would most likely get shot. I've never seen a photograph that was worth a bear's life.