Extension News: March 2008 Archives

It's spring and New Hampshire's black bears will soon be waking from a long winter nap. Their autumn goal was to eat five times their summer intake, trying for a five-inch layer of fat. As the weather cooled down, so did their appetites, and they sought winter lodging.

Biologists have learned that appetite in bears is controlled by leptin, a hormone secreted by fat cells. As bears fatten, leptin travels through the bloodstream, signaling the brain to suppress the appetite. As the weather warms, their hunger returns slowly. Bears in good condition still have some fat remaining in spring, and they feel no hungrier on arising than when they hunkered down. This arrangement with the hormone leptin is essential. It could prove fatal for a bear to spend a lot of energy in late fall and early spring searching for scarce food.

Bears aren't true hibernators; their metabolic rate slows only moderately and their body temperature drops only a few degrees. In his book Winter World, Bernd Heinrich describes winter bears as "the ultimate, enviable couch potato." For five inactive months they suffer no thirst, require no bathroom facilities, and show no change in muscle fiber and only negligible loss of muscle mass. Despite lack of exercise, they lose no bone density.

After burning fat for fuel, bears' cholesterol levels are double their summer readings and double those of humans, yet even an old bear has supple arteries and no gallstones. They don't get bed sores, and the sows continue napping after giving birth to their non-hibernating offspring. How bears accomplish all these metabolic feats is poorly understood.

Most of us think of bears simply as large, potentially hazardous beasts randomly roaming the deeper woods and occasionally galloping across the roads. Largely due to our comparatively weak senses of smell and hearing, we rarely imagine that them as having vibrant and complex social lives. Ben Kilham, who has been raising orphaned bears in the woods since 1992, describes bears' social play, their varied repertoire of vocalizations, and their advanced methods of teaching by demonstration.

Bears, Kilham notes, are also capable of remorse, empathy, and deception, qualities which indicate a highly developed sense of self-awareness and awareness of the minds of others. Kilham has recorded what appears to be altruistic behavior, suggesting that bears occupy the same level of intelligence as the larger primates.

After reading Kilham's book Among the Bears, I came away with a vision of the forest as a dynamic place full of complex visual and olfactory animal messaging systems. Bears are repelled by and attracted to each other across the landscape. Although highly social, they rarely come into actual physical contact, because bears' large food requirements usually keep them widely spaced. When food sources are abundant, however, bears set up food allocation systems within their territories, allowing even non-related bears to benefit.

Which brings us to the seasonal drama of bears at bird feeders. At 160 calories per ounce, bird food is a powerful attraction. Although bears would prefer not to approach human artifacts, some do, and they appear to be able to map out routes for themselves and their friends. The bears that go to feeders are usually young males, hard-pressed between their mother's territory, from which they've been ousted, and the holdings of dominant male bears. They'll get by any way they can on the margins until they grow large enough to claim a place for themselves or emigrate.

People have a compulsion to lure wildlife nearer with food. Often we convince ourselves we're helping, or connecting with nature. It's certainly easier to see wildlife in your backyard than in the woods. People who intentionally feed wildlife have all the positive results of watching "their" deer, turkeys, and more, but claim none of the responsibility when things go awry.

The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department has been trying to educate people about the long-term ill-effects of winter feeding that Good Samaritans typically overlook. Some of the ill-effects they cite: increased predation, disease, and disruption of social and feeding patterns. Wild animals habituated to humans often break our rules by destroying gardens, breaking and entering for food, and rearranging backyards.

So, if you care about and want to support bears,remove bird feeders. In spring the birds don't need them. Frighten bears away if they appear in your yard. Many feeder-raiding bears end up being shot (not by Fish & Game officials, who generally try to relocate them, but by landowners).

And if you want to connect with bears, perhaps even see signs of bears and other wildlife, visit their native habitat. Spend more time in the woods.

Note: An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Bradford Bridge.

What a remarkable world we inhabit: remarkable in that Gil and I often “remark” about some interesting event, critter, or transition in the world around us. Yet, however much we consider ourselves simply as passive observers, we still participate.

Like at the blue jay’s wake. 

My husband Gil and I live in the woods next to the White Mountain National Forest. Our home has windows. Birds crash into their own reflections there, some defending their territory, some thinking the reflected branches are yet more forest, some in what appears to be a hormone-induced tizzy during mating season. Windows kill some birds. Some survive.

We see ghostly smudges and bits of feathers on our windows, and watch as dazed birds regain their composure, shake themselves, and return to the forest. Last year we had a most incredible full-body imprint of a blue jay on a window. It looked like the Shroud of Turin. We think we would recognize that individual jay today, its image was so remarkable. 

The National Audubon’s Web site says: “Recent evidence shows that collisions with glass may be a major source of avian mortality that's widely overlooked. Experts believe that about 100 million birds die each year in collisions with buildings and skyscrapers in the U.S. and Canada alone.” Wow! More reason for awe and action.

At dusk a blue jay flew into a window on the north side of our home. It laid in the snow, stiff little legs in the air, a look of disbelief in its open eyes. Gil picked it up to toss into the woods, where it would complete the cycle of birth to decomposition. We looked at the beautiful, now-silent, formerly bullying bird, its regal pointy head, its deep blue feathers still lustrous. We pursed our lips in a moment of guilt and recognition.

Then Gil tossed the dead jay into a brushy area with glacial boulders, moss, and discarded Christmas trees. The bird landed awkwardly. We shrugged, assuming some critter would appear in the night and grab it for a quick protein blast.

The following mid-morning, a raucous ruckus stopped us in our tracks, the sound exponentially louder than the normal alarm signaling a predatory bird in the neighborhood or the announcement of refilled birdfeeders. We peered into the trees.

A blue jay sat on each tree and branch within a thirty-foot radius of the dead jay, all screaming at that stiff, still angle of blue that held their attention.

Each live bird faced the dead bird. More flew in to join the commotion. The feeders sat empty. No other birds chirped or sang or cried, as if to reserve this sacred moment for the blue jays. They blamed and shouted and pleaded. They cawed and keened and criticized.

From branches only a few feet from the ground, forty, fifty, sixty feet up, all faced their dead compatriot. Some flew in closer to the deceased, tilting their heads as if to confirm death; others remained high above, calling to yet more jays from further distances, shouting the news.

It all lasted about three minutes. It seemed much longer. We stood, frozen, awestruck. We think forty or fifty blue jays attended the wake. When it ended, it ended abruptly. The forest went silent. Eerie.

One by one, the jays flew off. Then a chickadee chirped, a finch flitted to a feeder, and the forest regained normalcy. The dead blue jay has since been overlooked, forgotten, ignored, left to decompose with brittle blue spruce carcasses, quietly back into the earth.

Gil thinks the jays were confused and were either encouraging the dead bird to get up or running impact trajectories about how the bird had bounced that far from the window.

I think they knew the bird was dead. I can’t help but anthropomorphize. I think that community of jays gathered for a mourning ritual and cawed a eulogy.

Gil and I eavesdropped through the keening and cawing at the blue-jay’s wake, despite our guilt, despite knowing our home’s windows had killed a territorial and assertive blue jay, and numerous uneulogized chickadees, titmice, and finches. We even ate the grouse that broke its neck last winter.

This weekend we installed window coverings to reduce heat loss from our home. The Audubon Society recommends shades with a white backing like ours to decrease the reflectivity of windows and minimize  crashing incidents like the one that killed the jay. Our shades look good, save energy, cover the smudged windows, and—we  hope—will improve the longevity of our avian neighbors.

I say, if we are here to live, really live, we need to do all we can to minimize our impact on neighboring communities of other species. We need to acknowledge and respect our surroundings, with wonder and joy, some guilt, but mostly with awe.

By Laura Richardson, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener