Imagine running around trapping and collaring black bears and crawling into bear dens! Last year RESA students succeeded in trapping two bears, one at UWSP Treehaven and the other just outside of the city limits near one of the student's homes.
We would like to find out if black bears that live outside the city limits use habitat in the city limits of Rhinelander as part of their home range. Our hypothesis was that black bears that live outside the city limits use habitat in Rhinelander as part of their home range.
Another research question we had was to what extent do nuisance black bears depend on habitat in the city limits throughout the year? Our hypothesis was that we think that nuisance bears depend on habitat within city limits for the majority of the summer and fall.
We use radio telemetry to keep track of our bears; the GPS collars send out a signal that pulses at 120 pulses/minute and records a latitude and longitude of the bear's location every 2 hours. When we recover the data from the computer chip in the collar, there will be somewhere around 3,000 coordinates that will teach us where our bears have been traveling and living. After 5 hours of non-movement the collar will send out a mortality signal telling us that the bear is dead or the collar fell off.
We trapped our two nuisance bears using a culvert trap. What we used to attract the bear was sweet food and bacon grease. Dave Ruid, who is a wildlife biologist for USDA-Wildlife Services, immobilized the bears with an anesthesia drug. We helped pull the bears out of the culvert trap and monitor their heart rate, temperature, and respiratory rate to make sure they were responding well to the immobilizing drug. After the collars were fixed onto the bears, we gave them each two red ear tags.
We captured our boar on May 5, 2009 just outside the Rhinelander city limits. On June 29 he was seen on Cottage Road near the intersection of Hwy. 8 and Hwy. 51 a mile from the Tomahawk city limits. On July 28, Wisconsin DNR pilots located our bear at the south end of Willow Flowage. On October 21 the pilots located him southwest of the paper mill in Tomahawk. The pilot noticed bear hounds men close to his location and suspected that our boar was being chased by hounds.
We captured our sow on June 11 at the cabin owned by Biff Kummer, on Perch Lake near UWSP Treehaven in Lincoln County. On June 27, she was observed crossing Hwy. D, a quarter of a mile from Kummer Road. On August 27, the pilots located her signal a few miles north of the Rib River tower in northwestern Marathon County. On October 14 the pilots located her very close to Highland Road, one mile south of Hwy. 64, and 12 miles west-southwest of Merrill.
Our bears have undergone substantial movements during summer and fall. We are really excited to get our GPS collars and download the data to better understand where our nuisance bears traveled in north-central Wisconsin.
