Bearwalker of the Northwoods Natural World

'When I was little, everything I heard about black bears was scary.

'Today, they're still one of the most feared animals in North America.'

It's me, bear.

It's me.

'My name is Lynn Rogers.

'I've studied black bears for over 40 years. And during that time,

'my view of bears has totally changed.

'This might look dangerous, but I've developed a way of working with wild bears based on trust.

'And this bear, June, is the most remarkable bear I've ever known.'

With her yearling cubs, she's revealing more about bears than I ever dreamed possible.

She's teaching me how black bears think.

How they survive.

And why we've misjudged them.

The trouble is, she's not safe in these woods.

Over the next 12 months I'll be walking with June through the Northwoods...

..torn between the excitement of learning about her life

and my fear of losing her.

-I'm lucky to live in what

-I

-think is the most beautiful place in North America.

The Northwoods of Minnesota.

It's my favourite season, spring.

Bears all over the forest are coming out of their dens.

June and her year-old cubs are already up and out.

But her sister, Juliet, is still underground.

And that's because she's given birth to new cubs.

Like little monkeys, the first thing cubs do is practise climbing, their most important survival skill.

Everyone warns you never to go near a mother bear with cubs.

So what I'm about to do, most people would consider crazy.

It's me, bear. It's me, me...

OK, it's a picture day.

BEAR GROWLS

Are you happy to see me?

She's not a mean bear, she's just a nervous bear, but she'll calm down.

Juliet trusts me. She's just worried about the extra camera.

She'll do that ritualised display and then settle down.

Like if I wanted to... here...

Here she was slapping and looking really ferocious

and then she'll just, gently with her tongue, take things from my hand.

She understands the programme, I can pet her.

But if...

she doesn't understand what's going on then she gets nervous, then we see the slapping.

So, she's more relaxed...

she's laying her head on her paw...

got her eyes closed.

Kind of understands the situation so now she can settle down and do her regular stuff.

Getting this close is the only way I can learn about bears as individuals.

It's amazing the difference in personalities among bears and you can even see it as cubs.

This one with the light face

is braver, more adventuresome.

We've named the cubs David, Mimi, and Tia the light-faced one.

In this situation a grizzly bear mother might attack,

but I don't know of anyone killed by a black bear defending cubs.

And moments like this make me think other assumptions about black bears could be wrong.

Like most people in North America, I grew up with scary images of bears.

GROWLING

The hunting magazines I saw as a kid showed black bears attacking humans.

These pictures were drawn by artists who apparently knew little about bears.

But they haunted me for years.

Eventually, my fear turned to fascination and I became a bear biologist.

When I started out in the late Sixties

no-one believed we could observe natural behaviour.

Like everyone else, my wife, Donna, and I thought our only option was to work with tranquilized bears.

But except for these brief moments when we fit radio collars,

we seldom saw the animals we supposedly were studying.

After years, all we had were dots on maps.

There had to be a better way.

I've always loved nature.

As a kid, I gained the trust of animals by feeding them.

It never occurred to me to do the same with bears.

I'd always been told feeding bears would make them aggressive.

But I felt that a little food could build trust and open a whole new world.

I began to experiment, getting bears to associate my voice with food.

At first I was nervous, but gradually some learned to trust me, and me them.

And June has taken this trust further than I'd ever thought possible.

I've known her since she was a year old.

Last year she had three cubs.

This year I want to find out how those yearlings become independent.

It's April 21st.

Sue Mansfield, my field researcher, and I, are homing in on June and her yearlings.

Boy, when they are moving it's really hard to pin 'em down.

Something interesting, that shadow is moving...

Aha!

And there's a bunch of shadows.

Yeah, here they are.

It's me, bear.

Sue's going to help me do something that nobody else in the world will do.

'We're going to put a radio collar on a wild bear, but we're not going to tranquilize it first.'

Where's your little ones, huh?

OK, Lily.

Our scheme is to use trust and treats instead of tranquilizers.

So the treat today will be many nuts, more nuts than they ever saw in their life.

And we hope that they're distracted enough

that she won't mind when I put the radio collar on her.

I think that's good.

It will take Lily a little while to get used to the collar

but then it will be just like wearing a watch or something.

The purpose of that radio collar on this yearling and this family is to see how she will relate to

her mother after family break-up, which will happen in about a month.

Black bear mothers stay with their cubs for more than a year.

And then the family splits up. But we've never seen how that happens.

Not to act like a proud parent or anything, but this family of bears is providing more information

about bear biology than any bear in the world ever has.

It's just amazing, the relationship that Sue and I have with this family

opens the door to stuff we didn't believe was possible.

Our study site borders Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

It's the largest wilderness in the Eastern United States.

So it's a great place to study natural behaviour of bears.

But in these vast forests it's hard to find them.

Even with a radio collar, it can take hours to find a bear.

Through the trees I'm lucky to pick up a bear's signal from two miles away.

But from a hill, it's more like five.

Sometimes a bear like June can roam up to fifty miles.

When that happens the only way to find her is to fly.

But for most of the year she lives in a small territory, which she knows like the back of her paw.

Once we catch up with her on the ground we greet her with a handful of nuts.

Then she'll ignore us and allow us to follow her family for the rest of the day.

Bears only have five months to fatten up for hibernation.

From the time "green-up" begins in May, they're obsessed with food.

New shoots are packed with easily digested nutrients.

When it's warmer they can hit their favourite food - ant larvae.

Like anteaters, they have long sticky tongues, powerful claws and great strength.

Not to tear people limb from limb,

but to rip open logs and turn over rocks.

It's May 15th.

June and her family are wandering along the western edge of their territory.

They're curious about a hunting stand.

The irony is, today it's a playground.

Come September, when it's bear hunting season, this could be a deadly place.

By late May it's getting warmer.

June and her family are shedding their winter coats.

And they spend a lot of time trying to get rid of their underfur.

One thing we've discovered is how much bears play.

For an animal that is stuck underground for seven months,

play must be a fun way to get strong again.

Not only does it show how intelligent they are, it's great to watch.

I try not to get involved.

Having three energetic yearlings has got to be a handful for June.

And I have to keep up with them because I want to

see how June's relationship with her yearlings will end.

This is mother and daughter.

June is seven.

Lily is almost one and a half.

And close as these bears are today, tomorrow she could be chasing them away and saying,

"Don't come near me."

While they're together it seems to be a very deep bond.

We put a collar on Lily so we could see how she relates to June after they split.

Lily is a special bear too, but

it's hard to say at this point if she'll match June.

Whoa, see some sound, not ours, but some other sound really alerts them.

That was just Bud coming back.

Hi, Bud.

They sniff, they greet,

identify each other, everything's calm.

I've watched bears in the woods for thousands of hours now.

I never get bored of it.

The trouble is I'm learning enough that it's harder to answer questions.

I thought I knew a lot, but as I see all the variability I realise how little I know.

I'm just scratching the surface...

and that's after 41 years.

For the first time we're seeing the detail of their language and social relationships.

These yearlings will soon be independent,

but they're still nursing and behaving like little cubs.

It's interesting that they're nursing shortly before family break-up.

Bears make this strange, kinda cute motor-like sound when they suckle.

It means they're content.

CUBS CONTINUE TO PURR

We're making new discoveries all the time.

We've found that family members groom each other for parasites, like primates do.

Right now, June and her yearlings still seem very close,

so we've got a moment to check up on her sister, Juliet.

And when we catch up with her, we find things aren't going too well.

It's June 7th.

Juliet's smallest cub, Tia, has disappeared.

Mothers will pine for days over a cub.

But Juliet has to move on and provide for the surviving two...

David and Mimi.

They seem small for their age, especially Mimi.

When Mimi first emerged from the den she was full of beans.

Now she seems sluggish

and I'm worried about her.

I'm not sure how things will pan out for this family.

I'll need to check up on them again soon.

But right now I have to get back to June because this

is the time of year when females with yearlings are ready to mate.

And they're leaving scent all over the forest.

So the bears come out of the woods here, where they come down right through here, faint trail,

leading to that big tree down there, that big red pine, which is a marking tree.

But as they come along here they're sliding their feet.

It's a way of scent marking.

And now we're seeing the trail getting wider.

That means they're spreading their hind legs farther out, what we call

cowboy walking, sliding the feet and urinating at the same time.

And then they stand up with their back against the tree

and start rubbing, especially their crown, the back of their neck...

Then they might turn around and bite...

..and then they get down and they leave.

And they walk over this tree,

probably dribbling urine as they go.

And then they walk over this tree...

..and out along this trail,

and into the woods.

They have many ways of leaving scent wherever they go.

To read these signs I need to think like a bear.

Sometimes people say I've taken on the persona of a bear.

Bears are the one of the most intelligent of the North American mammals.

I don't mind being compared with a bear.

BEAR SNIFFS

Today is June 8th and we've found Lily and June again.

Lily has no idea that these are her very last moments with her mother.

June's scent has attracted one of the largest males in the area...

Big Harry.

He's over 200 kilograms.

Male bears can kill youngsters.

So Lily retreats up a tree with one of her brothers.

June is torn between her attraction to Big Harry and her concern for her yearlings.

CLICKING

Big Harry clicks his tongue.

He's showing his friendly intensions toward June.

If June accepts Big Harry,

her yearlings will be on their own for the rest of their lives.

Lily's terrified.

LILY YELPS

June's bond with her yearlings has been so strong.

But now it's over.

CUB CONTINUES TO YELP IN BACKGROUND

It may be traumatic for the yearlings,

but for mother bears, accepting a male marks a new beginning.

MUSIC: "I Take You There"

# Oh!

# I know a place, ah

# Ain't nobody cryin'

# Ain't nobody worried

# Ain't no smilin' faces... #

No-one has recorded wild bears mating before.

These good vibrations we call "fluttering".

People tell me mating bears could attack us.

But, they've never even threatened me.

Big Harry is especially gentle.

But some people have a knee-jerk fear of bears.

And that can put bears, and us, in the firing line.

-GUNSHOT RINGS OUT

-'911.'

'Hi, somebody just shot at us.

'We were walking with bears and a shot came across the road at us.

-'Where are you?

-About two and a half miles down the Trygg Road.'

'It's June 9th, the day after Big Harry and June got together.

'And as they crossed the road someone took a pot shot at them.

'We called 911 because it's illegal to shoot bears out of season and across a public road.

'Walking with bears allows us to see the dangers they face.

'Some people are so afraid of bears they shoot them on sight...

'even when they pose no threat.' It's me, bear.

MONITOR BEEPS REGULARLY

'Most people say approaching a wounded bear is risky.'

There you are.

But Sue and I need to find out if June or Harry have been hit.

If you could just move so that you could show us if you have a wound, that would be ideal.

Here we are in the woods

20 feet from a 400+ lb male who we think may be wounded,

but he's not, he's not showing any signs of aggression.

Oh, look at how he is favouring that back right hind leg.

He just now put his heel down.

Good bear, June, good bear.

Yeah, good bear.

June's appeared and seems to be checking that Big Harry is OK.

He couldn't get up to join her so she's going over to join him.

This particular bear

I saw with a bullet wound, a fresh bullet wound

towards the end of last summer and that's why he has that, that bare spot above his tail...

That's from, where that bullet entered and the healing process caused him to lose his fur there.

I think a lot of our bears are carrying lead.

Unfortunately, trying to capture him could do more harm than good.

We can only hope he'll recover.

48 hours later, Big Harry and June are still together.

I worry for both of them.

But it would be a huge blow to the research if we lost June.

I don't blame people for being afraid of bears, because we all grow up with ferocious images of them.

I want people to know enough about bears so they don't shoot them out of misplaced fear.

The best way for people to do that is to meet them.

That's why we've started courses at our research cabin.

'Nicole is from Quebec.

'And like many people, she's afraid to go hiking because of bears.'

I came here because I want to overcome my fear of bears.

Because I'm a hiker and I want to go back to hiking this summer.

Seldom we hear something good or nice about a bear.

'It's in my mind now.

'I work on my mind.'

Now, now it's time to face your worst fear, your worst nightmare here.

-What's his name?

-Black as midnight.

LAUGHTER

Dale. His name is Dale.

'She's meeting Dale, a young bear that sometimes visits the cabin.'

I don't have any hormones...

See if he likes you. Dale.

When it comes here, what do I do?

Dale, do you like Nicole? Do you like Nicole?

He says wow, this is, everybody's right here, oh...

I do like Nicole.

Well, Dale, you're not even using your teeth.

Wouldn't you rather have human flesh?

Good, I'm all shaky!

I'm so pleased.

'We've been criticised for feeding bears.

'There's an assumption that fed bears will expect food and become aggressive.

'But the funny thing is...

'no scientific research supports this.'

And it's not what we see.

Around here many home-owners have been feeding bears for over forty years.

We have fewer nuisance bears than other parts of the country and we've never had an attack.

Bears' lives are ruled by fear and food.

When people see wild bears they can get the wrong idea.

When bears get scared they sometimes swat the ground or a bush.

People think they're about to attack.

But it's just their way of saying "I'm nervous, give me some space and let's talk about it."

Bears show their tremendous power towards each other.

Sue filmed two of the biggest males, Lumpy and One-eyed Jack, fighting over a female.

Males have died in these fights.

One-eyed Jack is old and gets the worst of it.

I hope he'll be OK.

The big males look frightening, but we've found them to be even more gentle than the females.

When One-eyed Jack visited the cabin,

I laid some nuts on the weigh scale hoping he'd let me check him for wounds.

Jack was blinded in one eye, years ago, when a landowner shot him.

Today, he weighs nearly 250 kilograms.

I'm moved that Jack trusts me now, after what a human did to him.

It says a lot about the true nature of black bears.

Jack has no feelings for me.

He's just happy with the deal here.

Touch is a universal language.

It helps us collect data we couldn't get any other way.

I'm happy to see Jack is healing well.

But sometimes other bears fail to thrive and it's difficult to work out why.

It's mid-August

and June's sister, Juliet, now has a problem with another cub.

David is doing well, but little Mimi is sick.

She's shaking

and having a hard time keeping up with her mother.

Later that day

Mimi disappeared.

JULIET CALLS FOR MIMI

She's looking for her cub. Here's the one following her that's healthy.

We've just got to watch what Juliet does here...

She's looking round in these ruts, and there's space beneath the ruts, the bear could be under that rut.

There it is, there it is.

There's the cub.

She led us to her.

JULIET CALLS

Your heart really goes out to a little cub like this that,

er, is just trying hard to grow up and make its way

and got caught with some kind of sickness, I don't know what.

Juliet started with three cubs

and lost first a female and now this female is sick.

She's got a male still with her, very healthy...

Juliet seems like she doesn't know what to do...

Here's a cub that she's staying in the vicinity of where it is.

But she has to eat, make milk to help the other cub survive.

She's torn...

I'm just waiting to see what's going to happen in the next 24 hours with this bear.

It could, it could make a miraculous recovery and I'll be happy

or it could be that, it looks like it's just going downhill.

Many times through the research I've seen situations where I've wanted to help

and very glad that I didn't intervene because I wouldn't have learned anything.

I would have just helped one bear, and not learned anything that could help all bears.

That night, I returned to Mimi's resting spot under the tree.

She'll still warm, but dead...

And there are signs the mother has been back to check.

Here's a clump of fur that she probably checked to see if the cub was responsive.

And wasn't, and she wasn't here when I came, so she probably then just went on.

OK, come on, little girl.

I wanna see what happened to you...

OK, at least we'll find out

what happened.

It looks like she died in her sleep.

Her eyes are closed.

Poor sick cub.

MUSIC: "Delicate" by Damien Rice

# We are alone

# Nobody's watching

# We might take it home... #

Later, we found out that Mimi died from a deer parasite.

We're now studying it to see if it will affect other bears.

# It's not that we're scared

# It's just that it's delicate... #

It's August 22nd.

Summer's ending, and the bears need to pile on the pounds before they den.

This year there's plenty of wild food to go round...

and it's led to something unusual.

Three male yearlings from different mothers are hanging out together.

We've named them The Three Amigos.

Dale, his brother, Mickey,

and June's yearling, Cal, have formed a gang.

# Sittin' in the jailhouse tryin' to learn some good... #

I want to study this friendship so I need to get collars on them.

MUSIC: "Sissyneck" by Beck

# Got a stolen wife and a rhinestone life

# And some good ol' boys

# I'm writin' my will on a three-dollar bill

# In the evening time... #

I just managed to collar Cal and Mickey,

but Dale would have none of it.

The Three Amigos trust me here at the cabin.

But they won't let me follow them in the forest.

They're on their own. And hunting season begins in just a few days.

Hunting is a big part of the culture here in the Northwoods.

People hunt bears for trophies and for meat.

The six-week bear hunting season begins on September the first.

From mid-August hunters put bait out to attract hungry bears

to their shooting stands.

At the same time, we put up signs asking hunters not to shoot our 12 radio-collared bears...

out of the 15,000 bears in the State.

We tie ribbons on collared bears

so hunters can easily see these are research animals.

-Pretty in pink.

->

The next day, I was putting ribbons on Lily when we saw the harsh reality of

her life after the family split.

OK. Lily.

OK, come nice bear.

OK, come on. Here, bear.

FIGHTING CALLS

That was amazing.

June was back here.

Lily was here for us to put ribbons on her collar.

All of a sudden June just barrelled through...

..right past me, nudged me as she went by,

and Lily tried to get up that Tamarack tree but then came back down.

I think it's because June bit her.

These mothers really enforce it that you cannot hang out where I'm hanging out...

On the other hand, if Lily were down in her usual area

which is south of these lakes here,

right in the middle of June's territory,

June passes through there quickly giving her exclusive feeding privileges

in that area, but apparently not here.

We're learning stuff all the time about family relationships after family break-up.

June's had to be brutal to Lily. She needs to defend her food patch for any future cubs.

But tomorrow they will have bigger problems.

It's the first of September.

Hunting season.

Research bears like June are so valuable to science that when

hunting starts, we try to follow them from before dawn until after dark.

That also puts US in the line of fire,

o we wear fluorescent jackets to be more visible.

This is the only time black bear research becomes dangerous.

In my 41 years of research I've never found a bear like this,

that I could walk with, rest with, and have her be this calm...

'If this bear is killed it would just ruin the project.

'She's seven years old and she has become the gentlest,

'most trusting bear that I, I could imagine.'

But like any wild bear, June could be drawn to a hunter's bait.

The hunter was nice enough to call me and describe the bear.

And it was Dale, one of The Three Amigos.

Mickey, Cal and Dale, they hung out together.

We wanted to find out how that relationship, how long it would continue, but well...

we won't get that.

When you find out that a bear you know has been killed it does something to you.

You're happy also to know that the death was quick.

It's ironic that it was Dale,

the animal who helped so many people get over their fear of bears.

We hate to lose Dale, but on the other hand

hunting is a fact of life here.

We're going to be on edge for the next six weeks...

It's a six-week hunting season. This is just day one.

We'll see what happens tomorrow.

30 years ago I helped re-write the State's bear hunting regulations.

We reduced the season from 52 weeks to six and made it more humane.

BEEPING

A few days later, there's another gunshot.

This is where the tree stand was.

And this is where the bait was.

Then we found Mickey's remains.

There's no way the person would miss that this is a radio-collared bear.

This bear could have given us so much information.

He was an unusually good bear for research.

Now he's just gonna be a little meat in somebody's freezer, maybe a skin, maybe a head on somebody's wall.

And he could have given so much to science.

There were three amigos, Mickey, his brother Dale,

and June's yearling Cal,

were just three friends that went everywhere together.

And then Dale got shot the first day of hunting season, and then

Mickey did and then Cal just loyally hung in there, close by Mickey,

the only one left of his two friends.

I worry because we are less than a week into a six-week hunting season and we've already lost

two valuable study bears.

So, we'll see what happens.

I worried our study animals would be vulnerable.

But on average they are four times less likely to be shot.

This year was worse than usual.

I hope the more we learn about bears, the more tolerant we'll be.

It's a fact...

the more experience bears have with people the less likely THEY are to harm US.

Most black bear attacks happen in the remote areas of Canada and Alaska.

In the Eastern US there have been only three fatalities in the last hundred years.

'I wish people could see what I see.'

It's September 5th.

June has found a den on a protected island.

She's denned really early, which could mean she's pregnant.

Before she settles in she gives me an amazing opportunity.

She allows me to measure her heart rate, so I can track the enormous

changes that happen to her body as winter approaches.

I'm checking her heart rate because in the winter

their heart rate drops greatly to as low as eight beats a minute.

And right now she's in transition, she's making her den, she's slowing down for the winter.

Just a few days ago the heart rate was 78.

Yesterday it was 64.

Today it's 60.

I'm just amazed

at the tolerance

of this bear.

She's showing just complete trust.

It's not that she likes me.

It's just that she trusts me.

# Sleep

# Don't weep

# My sweet

# Love... #

We are so relieved that she's going into a den this early.

There's five weeks of hunting season to go yet. She's going to be safe.

It's a beautiful time of year.

'But my wife Donna and I can't sleep easily until all our bears are in dens.

Lily's made it through hunting season, all by herself.

She makes her first den in early October.

Juliet and her surviving cub David, are sleeping safely too.

And even Big Harry will see another spring.

For the first half of my life I struggled to conquer my fear of bears.

Bears like June have taught me that they are not the ferocious animals we once thought.

And that I'm safer here in the woods than anywhere else.

But I wonder if I will be able to share with others

what it's taken me a lifetime to learn.

BIRD SINGS

I can't wait until spring to see what else June can teach us.

In April, I walked across the last of the melting ice to June's den.

It's me, bear. Come, June.

Here. Look at that.

I found she had two beautiful new cubs.

To me, there's nothing cuter in the forest.

Maybe they'll do as much for bears as June has.

They give me hope that people will one day learn to overcome

their unreasonable fear of these timid and intelligent creatures.

And that these wonderful forests will continue to be their home for generations to come.

# And I think to myself

# What a wonderful world

# World Some day I'll wish upon a star

# Wake up where the clouds are far behind me

# Where trouble melts like lemon drops

# High above the chimney tops

# That's where you'll find me

# Oh, somewhere over the rainbow... #

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