In search of the sleeping bear

By Pat Stinson
Sun contributor
In January, as snowshoe hares bound across Thoreson Road and minks skirt a frozen wetland at the foot of Alligator Hill, northern Michigan black bears snooze in their dens, tucked into secret places throughout the Upper (U.P.) and northern Lower Peninsulas. During this month, one of nature’s most intriguing phenomena will occur. Pregnant black bears (females are called “sows”) will give birth to between two and four tiny cubs while curled asleep under logs, in dirt holes left by uprooted trees, or among branches and leaves the sows have gathered that resemble giant birds’ nests.

“It’s pretty amazing that this all happens in the wild, sometimes without protection in a nest-type den completely out in the snow,” said Dr. Larry Visser, NW Wildlife Management Unit Supervisor for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR).

Dr. Visser, who spent 15 years as the state’s black bear research biologist, said the hairless cubs weigh around 10 ounces at birth and, with their eyes still closed, crawl immediately to their mother’s belly, where the hair is thinner and the sow’s body heat keeps them warm as they nurse. Throughout the birth and three months following, the sow (whose body stores “lots of fat”) remains inactive and is not feeding, even as the cubs grow to 3-5 pounds by the end of February and reach 10 pounds by the time they leave the den in April.

Leelanau Sightings
According to MDNR, Michigan’s black bear population is estimated at 15,000-19,000, with 90 percent living in the U.P. and 10 percent roaming the northern Lower Peninsula. The agency’s website describes the bear population in Leelanau County as “medium density” and eastern Benzie County and southern Grand Traverse County as “high density.” In Leelanau County, MDNR registered 11 bear complaints (nuisance bears visiting orchards with bee hives, for instance) in 2003 and one sighting each in 2004 and 2005. No Leelanau complaints or sightings have been reported to the agency in at least two years, but that doesn’t mean the bears no longer live in or frequent the area. (In fact, Cherry Republic’s June 9, 2008 newsletter reported that Greg Halik, who lives on the southwest side of Glen Lake, spotted and photographed a bear near his house. The popular Glen Arbor store subsequently put its cherries “under protection of the Home Guard.”)

Dr. Visser explained that in the early 1990s — when bears made a significant comeback in the Cadillac area, where his study began — there were initially lots of sightings and complaints. As people learned about bears and how to coexist with them, (beekeepers putting electric fences around hives, for instance, or citizens taking down birdfeeders in the summer and bringing them in at night), they received fewer calls.

That’s one explanation for the absence of sightings here, but as Dr. Visser explained, a bear’s home range can be huge — up to 400 square miles: “They can show up just about anywhere. One of the things bears do is travel great distances.” One radio-collared cub, a yearling from Manistee, traveled to Leelanau County with its mother and spent some time in this area before finding a permanent home between Grayling and Gaylord. Visser said about Leelanau’s count: “There could be more bears now than in 2003.”

Bear sightings and signs within the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (the local branch of the National Park Service) remain sporadic and, as described by Park Wildlife Biologist Ken Hyde, “It’s not nearly as exciting or steady as calls we’ve gotten for cougar.” In a season, only two or three calls or cards completed by park visitors mention bears.

“Just about every year it seems a bear walks past Glen Haven,” he said. “They don’t stick around. Agricultural lands have more food.”

Even so, in 2006, campers at D.H. Day Campground discovered bear tracks along the beach and took a plaster cast. Hyde was there and positively identified the tracks. (See “Bears in Glen Haven!,” Glen Arbor Sun, June 29, 2006.) In 2007, a black bear sign was reported at North Bar Lake in Empire and at Platte Plains, several miles to the south. In 2008, a resident living within the park reported that his critter-proof bird feeder had been emptied a bit too quickly and handily. Other anecdotal evidence can be found online in the Glen Arbor Sun archives, (“The Bear Is Not Sleeping…”, June 15, 2000.)

Hyde has seen large piles of scat he believes are too big to belong to coyotes and has visited berry patches with “munched or broken branches, sometimes flattened to the ground.” This is enough for him to keep a watchful eye when picking. Steve Yancho, Sleeping Bear’s chief of natural resources, has found evidence of dens in his years with the park, particularly in swamps. Hyde said that swamps around Tucker Lake in Glen Arbor Township, hold “lots of potential dens,” but there have been no bear sightings there.

Tracking Bear
But, how does a researcher find a sleeping bear? They enlist the help of hunters and trappers who wander the woods, fields and swamps in winter. In summer, they look for smooth dirt around uprooted trees and well-defined trails leading in and out, as Hyde does. Or, like Dr. Visser, if they haven’t identified potential den sites before the snow flies, they tromp on snowshoes through a white blanket two feet thick while carrying 50-pound packs filled with shovels, tarps, kits and handling equipment, listening for cub squeals and nursing sounds. Once the bears are radio-collared, their movements can be tracked from the air. Cubs live with their mothers for 18 months, so researchers re-entering the den the following year can take hair or tooth samples from the same bears — if things went well in the wild.

Why Care about Bears?
Bears roaming free can live approximately 30 years, according to a University of Michigan website on animal diversity, but most live about 10. Over 90 percent of deaths in black bears over 18 months old can be attributed to gunshots, trapping and motor vehicle accidents. These highly intelligent and extremely curious creatures help disperse seeds with their berry and fruit munching and keep populations of colonizing insects and moths under control. They’re known for their keen sense of smell, sniffing out vacuum sealed freeze-dried food and closed containers of bird seed left in outdoor sheds. (Remember the Northport bear?) Their unsurpassed navigational talents have stumped researchers and could hold the key to a number of future scientific discoveries.

Beyond their place in life’s web and their usefulness to us, there’s the lore. We’re positive that the small, black body we saw “sleeping” in a poplar tree south of Sleeping Bear Point wasn’t a porcupine, and the stripped bark on an elm atop Alligator Hill was the work of two giant paws, and the big stinky pile of black scat with berry seeds in the middle of a hiking trail south of Otter Lake was made not by a four-legged German Shepherd imposter howling at the moon, but by a three-foot-tall, four-legged beast swaying from side to side as she catches your scent and sizes you up, somewhere in that 55,000-acre wilderness.

Listen to recordings of bear vocalizations at www.bear.org. Read more about Michigan black bear studies in Walking With Bears by Terry DeBruyn, written while working toward his graduate degree in Dr. Visser’s study. To report locations of bear dens in the northern Lower Peninsula, call (989) 275-5151. Visitors to our area from southern Michigan counties who have spotted black bears in their areas can call (517) 373-9358, ext. 256. And please tell the Glen Arbor Sun about your sightings too. Email us at editorial@glenarborsun.com.