September 22 & 23
September 22, 2005
Slept well last night…no dreams about bears chasing old men…that’s good.
We woke up to no snares tripped this morning. For some reason, we ended up running our Spruce creek snares in the opposite direction than we usually do…I forget why…anyway…we decided to drag the road (which means we attach a dead thing to our truck and drag it behind us to lay a scent trail for a bear to follow to our traps). So, we dragged all of the Spruce Creek road…it was pretty early in the morning…about 9:30 as we neared the end of the road…and I was planning on pulling the item we were dragging in when we got to our culvert trap, so that we wouldn’t make a bear go past it.
As we rounded the corner at the site of the culvert…a grizzly bear ran across the road in front of us! I was sooo mad! That bear was going in to investigate the culvert trap…maybe get trapped in it!! Crap!!! Well, we didn’t want to stop right there, so we just kept on driving and stopped a bit past the trap to pull the drag in. I was so mad that we potentially stopped that bear from getting trapped, so I swore from there on that we would start going out later…It’s staying colder later into the morning, so the bears are active longer…
We went back in to the Red Meadow site so D could put the charged camera back in, then, after listening to the signal on the Spruce Creek culvert in the hopes that maybe the bear didn’t run away from the site…but no signal to indicate it was tripped… we went to Coal Creek to re-set the snares that we had to release because of the male we trapped yesterday. As we drove onto the property…we saw the water bucket sitting on its side on the picnic table where the landowner had tossed it when the bear came running through. D and I both laughed.
After we re-set the snares, we hooked the culvert trap onto the truck and drove it to another drainage called the South Fork of Coal Creek and drove it a ways in there to set it up in there. D put up a camera on it and after about an hour and a half or so, we finished setting up that site and left the area. We made a detour into West Glacier for some groceries and gas and headed back up. We listened to the culvert transmitter again…but no signal telling us the trap was hit…but we did have a signal indicating that one of the snares on Spruce Creek had been hit. We went in, but there was nothing in the snare. We left it open for the evening and went home. Sigh.
September 23, 2005
We slept in this morning, which felt wonderful! Had breakfast in bed and about 9:00 we started getting ready to hit the road. We can hear the Spruce Creek sites from the driveway…so, we usually listen to those before we pull out. I got into the truck and D was listening to the different signals…the one snare we knew was tripped, but then the other snare had a signal that it was tripped…and so did the culvert! Wow!! Well, I wanted to run to listen to the Red Meadow site first since it’s pretty far in to the drainage. We went to our spot to listen to that signal and it was tripped, too! Geez!
We drove in to the Red Meadow site, but nothing was in the snare…it had been tripped, but no bait was taken and D had nothing on the camera to indicate that anything had been to it…so it could have happened at night…who knows. I re-set the snare, D re-set the camera and we drove back out and went to Spruce Creek. We drove to the culvert first and, sure enough, there was something in there. Upon closer look it was, indeed, a grizzly bear. It looked just huge…but they really all do to me! Its head was really big, which is usually a male characteristic, and its chest was really wide…based on the size, I was thinking it was a male…but it was surprisingly submissive in the culvert, which made us think that we had a female…but I was really thinking we had a male…D said it was a female…he had a feeling. We called Tim, but he said we should run the rest of our sites before he’d come up. We went to the other Spruce Creek site, but no bear in the snare that was tripped.
We ran the rest of our sites, which usually takes about an hour to an hour and a half…no other snares were tripped. So, we called Tim and headed back up. We stopped at the Merc for lunch and to wait for Tim to come up…he was bringing the wildlife supervisor, Jim, up with him and our good friend Keith who’s been up helping at the train derailment and had a day off. They met us at the Merc and got themselves some lunch and then we all headed up to the culvert.
Everyone was guessing this way and that if it was a girl or a boy…I was still leaning to male…D was sure it was female…Tim said it could be female…Jim was sure it was a male and made a bet with D. We drugged it and pulled it out of the culvert and it turned out to be a she!!!!!!!! Yippee!!!!!!! Well, she was about 15 years old, so too old to be that special female that we’re going to take to the Cabinets that Jim has been waiting so long for us to trap…but that’s okay, we needed another female bear for the research study. So, we collared her and did the usual work-up and everyone took pictures with her. She was a very big bear for a female…I’m not sure how big, probably about 300-325 pounds, and such a big head for a girl…but it’s not unheard of. She was beautiful and tough and so chubby!!!!!! She was in great health for an older bear, which is a great sign for all bears…younger bears are probably doing better! They should all winter just great with the amount of fat they’ve got on them for it being only September!!!
Some pictures of the Spruce Creek Female:
In the culvert trap:
The bear drugged with an eye-maks on:
A head-shot of her:
D with the bear:
D and me with the bear:
Me with the bear:
Well hand shakes and hugs went all around, then Tim, Jim and Keith loaded up and headed back to town…Tim had a female black bear with cubs he had to release that was causing problems in town. That left D and I to sit with the female and make sure she woke up okay. Where she was drugged, we had her pointing downhill and in a step or two, there was a gentle downhill slope into a small ravine…it was our hope that she would just naturally go that way. After she woke up and started rolling around in an attempt to get her feet back under her…well, gravity pretty much did the job for us as she rolled right down that hill and out of our site. Happy with that, we left her alone and went to re-set our Spruce Creek snares.
We toyed with the idea of going to dinner at the Northern Light Saloon to celebrate…but seeing as that would cost a bit more money…we nixed that idea and decided to spend a quite night at home together…so here we are. We’re going to celebrate by watching a movie. Exciting lives, eh?
If we could just get that young female…