September 28 & 29
September 28, 2005
No bears today. We rebaited some of our sites to make them stink more. One of the sites was Coal Creek. We had been in there a week ago and walked up a particular road that went on past one of our sites…I was wondering if there was a place to put a trap…but there was nothing up there that would make a good trap site. We walked back down to the truck looking for bear sign but didn’t find much of anything…so on we went.
Well, today I drove up that road a little bit to drag down it toward our trap sites. As I was driving I looked up and saw a spectacular site…I slammed on the brakes and said, “Woah! Look at the claw marks on that tree!!!!” We jumped out and there was this big pine tree not far from where our traps were, that had these big long claw marks all over it…it kinda looked like a bear was trying to climb the tree but was struggling with it…but the claw marks went up pretty high. There were a million different scenarios to what could have been going on…a cub up the tree that a male bear was trying to get to…a black bear up in the tree that a griz was trying to get to…an adult bear trying to get away from another adult bear…and on and on…wolves, mountain lions? We looked for hair on the tree but didn’t find any. There was a stump next to the tree that I found two strands of grizzly bear hair on…one looked pretty small…but that could be from a bear tearing at stumps in the past. Who knows what happened there…but we do know that it wasn’t there when we were up looking around there last week!! We would have seen that! Crazy!!
So, we finished up and left and headed home…another early day…good to relax again.
September 29, 2005
Got up to a light drizzle…and a chilly humidity, although it wasn’t too cold outside.
Our Spruce Creek cubby was tripped, so we ran to Red Meadow and made sure all was quiet there…and it was…drove into Spruce Creek and there was nothing in the snare…dangit!! We got out of the truck and walked up and D was checking his camera while I went to see the site and…to our surprise, there was a big mound of dirt next to the cubby…the bear had cached the bait!! Well, that kinda put us on alert, too, because the bear might still have food in there and want to guard it. So, D pulled his camera out and we went and sat in the truck to watch it and, sure enough, it’s a grizzly bear…one we don’t know…looks female! So, we talked a little bit about it. Of course we wanted to re-set, but I just hate that cubby, I think the ground is too soft and the whole snare set just sinks when the bear steps on it…we’ve been beat there so many times! What to do, what to do? We don’t have another snare to set…should we pull from another site and beef this one up?
This is a picture of Tim behind the cache:
We called Tim…he said we should definitely re-set and pull another site. We chose to pull our Hay Creek site that has had zero activity. Tim also thought we should put a culvert there, too…he said he’d bring one up since both of the culvert traps we’ve got up here have had males in them and there is a risk that a female wouldn’t get in a trap that stank of males. So, we said we’d run the rest of our traps and meet him. We needed to give him the tire from the culvert that the bear bit, too.
No other activity at any of our other sites. We talked about setting all of those traps and we kind of hoped Tim might want to come up with us to the site and give us some advice, but we weren’t going to pressure him. We met him at the junction of the main road and the Coal Creek road and said hello. I went to the back of our truck to pull out the bad tire to give to him and when I dropped it to the ground I heard the distinct sound of air leaking form a tire…but it couldn’t be the one I had with the bite in it. I put my ear to the rear tire of our state truck and, sure enough, it was losing air quickly. I smiled and said, “Well, if you guys have a minute, our tire is going flat.” We all had to laugh…we’ve been having back luck with tires lately!
D changing the state truck's tire:
So, we took a bit to change the tire on the state truck, complicated by the fact that the spare was flat, but luckily D had a small air compressor that we carry with us…we started doing that when bears started tearing apart the tires on the culvert traps!
While we were doing that, we chatted with Tim and asked him if he had some time to spend with us and he said, “Yeah, I thought I’d come up with you guys to the Spruce Creek site and take a look.” Well, we were very happy with that, so once the tire situation was hammered out, we loaded up and drove up to the Spruce Creek site. Once there, we set the culvert trap that Tim had brought with him and D took off in Tim’s state truck to remove the night camera from our Red Meadow site and move it to this one since this bear is coming in when it’s dark out. While D was gone, Tim and I set about looking at the area and trying to figure out what to do about new traps.
Tim sat and considered the cubby while I walked around looking for sign of how the bear was using the area and where to put a trail-set. I found a maze of trails behind the cubby and found a very, very, very large pile of poop…probably left from the male that we caught there a few days ago, but impressive, none the less! We wondered about me re-building the trail set that we caught the big male in, but he had torn the area up so much, we thought better of it.
Tim decided to re-set the snake-bit cubby snare…there was a very large root right in front of the snare set and he wondered if the bear wasn’t stepping on that root and stepping over the whole snare…so he set about cutting that root out, which was the size of a small tree. We also agreed on a nearby tree for me to put a trail set on. We made sure that a bear possibly caught in his cubby would not be able to reach a bear caught in my trail set…in the odd chance that we caught two bears…then we both set to work on our snares, chatting away pleasantly.
I have to say that setting the spring for the snare is a very tough thing…It takes a lot of strength to pull the spring together and latch it with the trigger-pan…usually I depend on D to do this for me as I have tried and never been successful in mustering up the strength to do it. But I have always known that I really need to be able to do it because D may not always be there to set the spring. So, I gave it another shot today…and I succeeded!!!!!!! I was so proud of myself! I looked up at Tim and said, “I just set my first spring!!!” He smiled, humoring me, and said, “Good job!”
We both spend a lot of time on our snares, in no great rush because we knew D was still going to have to set up his whole camera setup when he got back to us…so I worked on perfecting the trail where my trail-set was, and dressing it up to camo it and make it look like it belonged there…Tim did the same with his, dressing it up just right. Then we baited the sites with tons of stinky stuff. We finished up with that and I declared that I had some deer that I needed to butcher and now would be a great time, make the site that much more attractive with all of the blood. So, Tim helped me pull the whole deer I had that I still hadn’t butchered and helped me to butcher them up, taking some choice organs and using them in the various areas. As we were doing this, D finally drove up and got to work on his camera set up. This whole time it had been raining steadily, but we were all in pretty jovial moods with all of the effort we were putting in to this bear.
D's camera setup at Spruce Creek...one camera for day, one camera for night with an infrared light:
The bear, on camera, had a lighter head and we were excited at the prospect of it being a female. “She,” as we are referring to it…positive thinking, y’know!...is definitely an adult…but how old of an adult we don’t know…she could be just 6 years old…it looks like she’s got some lighter coloration going down her chest, which could be remnants of the collar baby grizzlies often have…we just hope, hope, hope this is our young female that will be taken to the Cabinet ecosystem. We want her so badly we can barely stand it…so many people are just waiting for her to show up and we so badly want to give everyone what they want. We’re the ones that are supposed to be aiming for her and, while you never know where she’s going to be or what you’re going to get…man, I just hope we get her soon!
We are planning on shutting operations down on the 5th of October in order to go to Missoula for a couple of days for a Vital Ground event…we’re looking forward to seeing our friends and getting away…and, in light of that, the federal biologists that are on the other end waiting for this female, have said that they will make that the cutoff point for moving the female, if we get her. In other words, if we get her in the next week, she will be moved to the Cabinet ecosystem…if we catch her after that, we won’t move her. We will still collar her and probably try to find her and catch her next spring…but she won’t be moved. I’m not sure what they’re reasoning is for that…it seems to me that, if we were to move her later in the season, it’s more likely that she’ll stay there…she’ll go den up and come out in the spring and check the place out. I dunno…it’s just odd that there’s this cut-off. But, regardless…we will keep trying!
Anyway, we spent three hours on that site…beefing it up, putting cameras on it…I put lure all over the place, nice and stinky. We left the site at 4 PM…Tim went back to town and D and I went to the Palace. Doug Chadwick is coming up with a friend and will most likely stay with us for the night…Chadwick has a cabin up here, but as late as they will get in, it’ll be tough for them to heat the cabin up. It’s going to be nice to be able to visit with Chadwick and the friend he’s bringing up is apparently one of the owners of Montana Coffee Traders, which makes coffee that D just loves…so, that’ll be nice for them to visit! I dread the idea of three men snoring in this house…sound echoes everywhere and the house is completely silent otherwise…I am going to be heavily dependent upon Tylenol PM to get me through the night! D is enough to wake me up…but three men! Oy!!!!