The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 037
Episode Date: June 10, 2016Albuquerque, New Mexico. Steven Rinella talks with wildlife ecologist Dr. Karl Malcolm along with Janis Putelis, Chris Gill, and Garret Smith from the MeatEater crew. Subjects discussed: the Wisconsin... Super Sow; why bears are marching south; what it means to work up a bear den; the fate of a bear drinking three gallons of gear oil; calorie rich bear milk; the difference between altricial vs. precocial; delayed implantation in bears; the dispersal behavior of black bears; and recent bear encounters while turkey hunting. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless,
severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We put the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless.
We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.
You can't predict anything.
Okay, welcome to the Meat Eater.
I changed the name.
It's now the Meat Eater Digital Radio Program.
I like that better there's a bunch of
people here i'm going to introduce them like how if i was dealing poker by going clockwise
yannis putellis bahayani is his new name garrett smith who has a distended belly right now and
he's and he's got a chew packed and somehow they're related like the chew is going to
alleviate his distended belly i think he was trying to tell us in some kind of subtle way.
Chris Gill, like a fish.
Like a fish.
Who's a turkey man now.
You just heard your first turkey gobble.
I did.
Is that true?
I think it is, yeah.
I can't remember hearing one before that.
I mean, you know, other than digitally.
Yeah.
And then Dr. Carl Malcolm.
Carl, tell us about the Wisconsin Super Sal.
Man, the Wisconsin Super Sal.
The Wisconsin, this is the most, this is it.
Yeah.
Tell us about the Wisconsin Super Sal.
All right.
So a little backstory.
Yep.
Lay it all out.
Lay it all out.
All right.
I mean, within reason.
Okay. Okay. So. So my Lay it all out. Lay it all out. All right. I mean, within reason. Okay. So,
so my mom met my father. Yeah. So it all began right around 1980.
All right. So I went to graduate school at the university of Wisconsin, Madison,
which by the way, was the first wildlife management program anywhere in the world
founded by Aldo Leopold after he left the Forest Service. That was one of the draws for me being kind of a Leopold junkie growing up. But going to Madison, I was in kind of
the Southern farm belt region of Wisconsin. And as you travel North in the state of Wisconsin,
you increasingly get into more and more forested landscapes to the point where you get up into
the northern part of the state and the northern third is predominantly forested so about halfway
up you're in this interesting mix where you've got about a 50 50 ratio of row crops like corn
and soybeans and forest and our good friend doug dern is south of that line. Yep, he's south of that line.
He's just like solid ag.
No, well-
Defining, like the defining feature,
or how would you put it?
You know, so the Driftless area,
the Southwest part of the state
where Doug Dern is located is interesting
because it does have a major agricultural component,
but there's certainly a lot of forest land.
And part of that is because there's so much slope, which is unusual for the rest of the state. So they couldn't get in there
and till it. Yeah. So there's some untillable land, which is where you typically have forest
there in the Driftless area. And this relates to the story because what's been happening for the
last few decades is that black bears throughout the Midwest are increasingly expanding their range
southward. So I don't know if Doug has any stories about bears showing up in his
property in the driftless area yet.
Not yet.
Cause I feel like if he did,
I would have heard about it.
Yeah.
Well,
cause he'll tell you about everything down to a greener showing up.
You know what I mean?
I imagine he would.
And I predict that he will have that story before too long because
certainly bears.
Why are bears marching south?
My theory on it, and this is completely untested,
and I'd recommend you do not publish the paper on this,
is that it just took them 150 years to get used to people.
I think that's not the case.
So what I think it has to do with is persecution.
So black bears are extremely adaptable with their diet.
Everybody knows they're like the classic omnivore.
They'll eat anything.
They can subsist on vegetation purely.
They can do very well chowing down on meat,
and typically speaking,
they're eating some combination of the two.
So they can exist just about anywhere where there's food for them.
You know my neighbor at my Alaska cabin?
He told me about a guy that had a bear come into his workshop and drink three gallons of gear oil.
That's unreal.
I wonder if it killed it.
If it didn't, it probably tore some gastrointestinal situations up.
Garrett Diggs' little dip will do it for you.
See, I was debating whether or not to go there,
but I took the high road and let you take it there.
So thanks for bailing me out.
So great omnivores.
Yeah, phenomenal omnivores.
So the point is they're really adaptable.
They can live just about anywhere as long as they're not being shot to the point where it's not sustainable. Like anything else, if you shoot enough of them or trap enough of them, if you eliminate enough from the population, they're not going to exist in a particular part of the state anymore. So the bears, like many other species that are managed by state agencies
as hunted species, have been on an upward trajectory since their low point when they
weren't being managed as such. So essentially bears, like many other species, were persecuted
by unregulated hunting for a long time and driven out. You mean we're just like no rules about take and it doesn't matter what time of year, saw
with cubs, whatever you could at a time shoot a bear and there was no repercussions.
Yeah, just like everything else, right?
I mean, at a time, that's how it was for all these species.
But under a management scenario where we're tracking populations, we're making sure that
the number of bears taken is
sustainable. They are showing that they're capable of existing well outside of what people think of
as bear country, including places like Southwest Wisconsin, which historically certainly had bears
and now increasingly has bears showing up. Places like Richland County, as an example.
Well, that's Duggs County.
Yeah, right. That's why I'm throwing it out there for you.
I almost feel like calling Dugg up right now.
If he doesn't have a bear story about his property-
He will soon.
He'll have, well, he will soon, I think.
And he'll certainly have bear stories
from other people's properties.
So part of the equation here
with the expanding bear population is the super sow and bears like her.
And the super sow was an individual bear that was part of my research project when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin.
Tell what you were doing.
Okay, so I was looking at that spatial expansion.
So what I was doing, I was specifically focused on dispersing sub-adults.
So black bears are really interesting
in that they're born in the den.
So they emerge into the world
with their mother in the den
and basically just latch on and nurse
for the first couple months of their lives.
And then the family emerges from the den in the spring. I got to ask you the question. Bring it. What's the difference
between precocial? They're not precocial. They are? Altricial. Altricial. Yeah. So they're born
in a state where essentially they're relatively underdeveloped. They're tiny. Their limbs are barely formed when they're born. And they
basically just navigate from the birth canal to a nipple, latch on, and bears in general,
including black bears, crank out some of the most calorie-dense milk anywhere in the animal kingdom. It's like liquid butter coming from those nipples.
So they grow really fast.
And I've been after the wrong nipples my whole life.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing.
So as an example, you know,
I had my hand on a lot of bears during the field work.
And when you'd go to work up a den
that had a sow with cubs,
the sows would be lactating.
And there were a number of times where-
Explain working up a den.
But here's a checklist for you.
I want you to do a quickie, precocial, altricial.
Do a quickie on that.
And then don't just say work up a den
because no one's going to know what the hell that means.
Okay.
All right, precocial, altricial.
So species that are born precocial
have the ability to do things like evade predation.
So for example, like pronghorn fawns,
when they're born,
it's a matter of days before they're up on their feet
and able to cruise if a predator shows up.
All right.
Altricial species are born in a state
where they still have a lot of development to go.
So humans are altricial.
Yeah, man.
Yeah.
I mean, an infant is not going to evade predation.
It's got to be protected, just like a bear cub.
All right.
Now, working up a den,
essentially what I'm referring to
is going into a place where bears are hibernating.
They've been located either
because they've got a radio collar
or someone from the public has encountered a den and contacted through some avenue researchers
like myself. And we go into the den with typically a pole syringe or a jab stick,
which is basically envisioned like a broom handle with a big syringe and a needle on the end.
And the goal is to be able to give the bear an injection in some major muscle
without putting yourself in harm's way.
So you're either trying to get an injection somewhere like in the buttock or in the shoulder.
Those are the two best spots to try to get a stick.
And the dens, you know, when people think of a
bear den, most folks are thinking like a hole in the ground with bears piled up in it, a cave,
a cave. Yeah. But a lot, and sometimes that is the case, but I would say, man, probably around
half the time they're above ground, maybe in like a, a slash pile where they've kind of carved out
a little nest or sometimes just laying on the ground
in the wide open. You were saying you found them denned up just under like some boughs over under
overhanging evergreen boughs. Yeah. I found them, you know, I found them denned up in places where
they really have almost no cover. They're just like laying there in the snow, getting snowed on
and the cubs will be curled up against their bellies. And it doesn't look like they put any effort at all
into seeking like shelter of any form.
So highly variable what these dens look like.
Do you have a, oh, go ahead.
I was gonna, I just asked if you have,
like, has that always been like that?
Like when you read older papers,
did they have research that shows that as well?
Or do you feel, do you have a hypothesis
on maybe why that's,
is it happening more now than it used to? Like the expanding bears aren't finding good spots?
No, man. Or maybe they don't need to because the winter's not. Well, I mean, in some places they
don't even hibernate, right? I mean, and hibernation is a whole different subject. You
know, they're not technically true hibernators. They go into like a seasonal sort of downturn in
their metabolism, but they're not a true hibernating species.
So I don't think it's something that has changed. I think it's part of their life history.
So no, I do not think that the denning without a hole in the ground is something that is new
for black bears. I think it's part of their life history. It has been part of their life history. They basically do what they need to do to survive. Some bears one year will make a den,
the next year not. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. One interesting pattern that
was true throughout my research and was conveyed to me by other folks who have done a lot of bear handling is that an individual bear will not use the same den location twice ever and in some cases including
i thought it was twice in a row but they'll alternate i've i've never seen a bear go back
to the same place and the people with whom i have done my research have never seen a den get reused. Would it make sense?
There's a guy I know in Northern Wisconsin.
Okay.
His last name was Hart.
Maybe Bill Hart.
He owns a t-shirt shop.
Where's Northland College?
Something like that.
There is Northland College.
I can't remember the town.
They have a thing called the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.
Yeah, yeah.
And I won that award and was hosted by this man, Bill Hart.
He took me down and showed me an undercut bank on his property
where every other year there's a black bear with cubs in there.
And there's a little hole he can even look in there.
So maybe it's different bears. It's look in there so maybe it's different bears it's just a spot it's different bears maybe it's the same bear disproving this pattern that i observed you know i'm sure i hate listen i hate guys like
i hate people that do what i just did wait because you're trying to talk about like
generally right yeah you're like generally it's bad to smoke tons of cigarettes. And then someone's like, my grandpa, you know.
So it's like, yeah.
Anyhow, interesting side note.
This fella by the last name of Hart.
I will go on to say this.
I guarantee you in the history of American black bears,
a bear has reused a den.
That's all I'm saying.
That's all I'm trying to say, man.
Generally speaking, black bears do not reuse den sites.
And this super saw that you asked about is a really interesting example of this
because she denned in the same like 100-yard by 100-yard area
but chose different locations within this small footprint
during the years that I found her.
Do you think they're worried about disease transmission of some sort?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe it's
who knows, man. Trying to get into the mind
of a bear is what we're doing here.
But I know, like, yeah, it's
when you're talking about, like, why things do
things. Yeah. Why animals do things.
A lot of people say, like, for instance, the other day,
my friend Hart, he's got a
bear that comes back to the same den.
Bill Hart. He's convinced
it's the same bear it might be it
could be yeah and i don't think i said like never has a bear done this i'm not taking your task
just i'm just asking a point i like it i like it um an annoying thing people do and i do it all the
time is you'll say let me give you an example i was yesterday admiring some turkeys that we shot on our turkey hunt.
It's a Miriam's turkey, and a Miriam's turkey has a lot of white on the end of their feathers.
I was saying, I wonder if that has to do with heat.
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Welcome to the OnX x club y'all reducing how many how much radiant surface because it's a it's an animal from the southwest
very intense sun an eastern turkey has a lot of black on it maybe these turkeys have a lot more
white on them
as an adaptive advantage about radiant heat.
Maybe that's a problem, getting too hot.
So I think that when you look at stuff,
you'd say, I can't say that that's why those turkeys
evolved that, not pellage, but what would you call it?
I'd call it that.
Okay, I can't say that's why those turkeys evolved that pellage,
but I could say that could be something to do with it
or that it could have that effect in reducing radiant heat.
Sure.
But I find talking to scientists like yourself,
I'll be like, oh, do they do it?
Do the bears not want to go back maybe because of mites
or some kind of thing like that?
I know you don't know all the way, but is that a reasonable?
Yes, it's a reasonable idea.
It's a reasonable idea.
Sure.
Yeah.
What would be another reasonable idea?
Maybe to be unpredictable.
If they've got a den that has been there on the ground for X number of months and a certain number of animals
have encountered that den and become aware of its existence, then there might be some adaptive
advantage to moving locations, you know, especially if you have those extremely altricial
cubs to look after. You know, basically the onus is entirely on a mother bear to make sure
those cubs get to the point where they can climb a tree and they've got a long road to hoe from the
time they're born before they're to that point. Yeah. Cause they're born in the middle of the
winter, right? Yeah, that's right. Like February or March or something like that. Yeah. Late January.
Really? Yep. And then, like I said, you know, when they're born, they're tiny.
And by the time they're coming out of the den, they've gone from being, you know,
like something you'd hold in the palm of your hand to being something that's four, five, six,
maybe seven pounds. And so the mother has, she's got to bring all that, all those calories, all that energy into the den with her, both to maintain that pregnancy, deliver the cubs, and then provide enough nutrition through her milk to get them to the point where when they emerge from the den, she can woof at them and they're ready to climb because once they leave the den
you know she's she's not in a position to just protect them yeah the way she can while they're
while they're all balled up in a pile dogs other bears all manner of things sure yeah definitely
so that's you covered on everything so far oh yeah you look like you're dozing off. No man, I'm sharp. I am sharp. I'm good. It is fascinating stuff. And by the way, one of the highlights of this week,
turkey hunting. Yeah, you guys almost got killed by a bear. No, we didn't almost get killed.
We had two bear encounters this week though. The first one was going out trying to locate some
birds in the evening. And I heard what sounded like a cub
kind of bowling down the hill from us and then a bunch of claw marks on a tree and then what had
to have been the sow popping her teeth and given how late it was in the day I decided not to take
the shotgun with me I was just kind of strolling up the hill and when I heard that sow popping her
teeth I was like let's let's take this other direction. And then, uh, what was even a cooler
sighting was, uh, it was yesterday morning, man, saw the, the biggest bear I've seen since coming
to New Mexico. And it was also the blondest bear, this great big boar and, uh, had him while I was
putting a decoy in the ground and heard a twig pop and looked over
and he was no more than 70 yards away
looking at me through the trees.
And he was just beautiful.
And then we set up a couple more times
and he came back in to check us out
and he was woofing at us from up the hill.
So we all got a good look at him.
It's just a beautiful animal, man.
And you're getting a lot of bear vocalizations,
which is unusual.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
You know, I was telling you,
I one time was hand calling to a tom, to a gobbler. which is unusual. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. You know, I was telling you, I,
one time was
hand calling
to a tom,
to a gobbler
and heard an exhale
over my shoulder.
Like how someone would do,
like they're a little bit tired
from walking up a hill.
And it was a bear,
I mean,
arms distance.
That might be an exaggeration.
Extremely close.
Enough where I could like, I could hear it breathe.
He's coming to kill that hen.
And when I turned around, man, it scared the shit out of him.
It scared the shit out of me.
I believe it.
He freaked out.
He did not like that little bit, man.
Yeah, and that big one yesterday, when he first saw me,
he went partway up a tree and decided that wasn't his best course of defense.
Came back down the tree making so much noise, breaking big branches, claws scraping down the side of the tree
and then tore off up the mountain. And it surprised me that he came back in to check us out when we
were calling again. So I don't know if the turkey- He went and got pumped up. Maybe, yeah. He's like,
come on, dude. Your whole life you've been running.
Go down there.
You've got that guy by at least two and a half bills.
It was an awesome animal, man.
Okay.
Wisconsin super sow.
Okay.
Wisconsin super sow.
So aside from the fact that she came back to the same general, I need more background.
Okay.
How many bear dens have you dug up?
I would have to look at my notebook to give you an exact answer. I would say,
gosh, in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 dens, something like that, that I've been out on.
All sows or everybody? No. So I should give you a little more context on the research project.
So we're interested in this expansion of black bears south in their range.
So individuals moving farther and farther south.
And as you know, from all the other species that show up in crazy places,
like mountain lions showing up in New York State,
these critters that go hundreds of miles,
typically it's these young males dispersing
that go great distances.
So I was really interested in looking at the dispersal behavior of black bears.
So what I needed for that research project was to get GPS collars on yearling bears.
And a little bit more about the biology of the species.
I got you.
I got you.
Yeah.
So born in the den, they get up to, let's say five pounds,
come out of the den with mom in the spring, keep growing, still really dependent on mom for their
defense, spend that whole spring, summer, fall by mom's side, like in sight of mom or in sound
range of mom. And if something's going wrong, all that mother bear has to do is
give a woof and the cubs know they got to get up the nearest tree. So what a lot of people don't
know is that when that second winter comes around, now you've got mama bear and a bunch of,
you know, we call them yearlings, but they're less than a year old.
They're just about to complete their first year.
They all den up together again.
So you'll have a bear den that might have,
let's say a sow that weighs 230 pounds.
And then she's got X number of one-year-old cubs,
some of which might weigh as much as 100 pounds themselves,
all piled up together.
So it could be a huge like biomass of bear in a heap. You're just in there sorting it all out. Yeah. And, and especially if they're underground, you know, so I mentioned, I described this,
this pole syringe that you use to sedate the bears. And if they're underground, you know,
you got like a headlamp and you're looking in there and it's a dark hole and a dark animal and they're the way that they're piled up. It's like super
spooning. It's like a tangled mass of limbs and heads and trying to figure out where one bear
ends and another bear begins. And you don't even know how many bears there are down in the hole.
It's like when our kids crawling with me and my wife, man. Yeah, just tangled up. You wake up, it's hard.
You can't get out.
So you're like, is that Steve's thigh?
You have no idea.
So it was and it is a nerve-wracking thing at first
to intentionally go up to a den and try to sedate these animals.
And you got to sedate the cubs too.
You have to sedate the cubs when they're in that second winter.
Because they'll tear you up.
Well, yeah.
Because they're 100 pounds.
100 pounds, yeah.
And they don't know what's going on.
They want to get away.
And you don't want to fracture that family prematurely either.
So you want to get everybody sedated.
Gotcha.
Because you don't want one to run off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah, then that can happen. You can don't want one to run off. Yeah. Yeah. And
yeah, then that can happen. You can have individuals that, you know, try to make a getaway.
So that's what I'm talking about when I say working up a den, going into sedatum and then
you're getting some, you're getting measurements, you're taking blood samples. You know, there are
other research projects. People were looking at a variety of other topics with respect to these bears. And one of the projects they're interested
in milk, in the bear milk. And I mentioned to you the fat content of bear milk, and we segued
several different times since then. But I wanted to mention on several occasions, I've had bare milk on my hands when I'm doing this in the winter.
And obviously, it's gone from bare body temperature out to wintertime temperature.
And it's almost instantaneous that it turns into a solid.
And you can smear it between your fingers and it feels like butter. I mean, it's so, it's got so much fat in it that the second you take it away
from that, that body heat from the mother, it turns into a solid. And obviously for the cubs,
it's just going straight from bare body temperature to bare body temperature inside the
cub's mouth while it's ingested. But if it gets out in that winter air, it is like a solid material.
So pretty fascinating stuff. So those cubs are putting on a ton of weight and the number of offspring that a single sow has in a given year is linked directly to her
body condition. So a bear that goes into the den in good condition will have more cubs than a bear
that goes into a den in poor condition. And one of the ways that this is controlled is that black bears have
what's called delayed implantation. So they get pregnant and these little fertilized eggs just
kind of float around in the womb for a little while. And then when the time is right, the body
is communicating to the brain what kind of condition it's in. And there are a variety of chemical interactions that scientists believe
drive this relationship. One of the keys is likely to be leptin, which is in circulation
in amount proportional to body fat. So a really fat bear, its body is telling its brain,
I'm in really good shape.
Its brain's telling its body, we should be having more cubs than in a poor year.
And more of those fertilized embryos will implant into the uterus wall and turn into cubs.
Dude, can you imagine if humans had delayed implantation, the implications would have? I'm imagining it. We'd still be, my wife would still have three floating in there. I'd
be like, no, not quite yet. I'm like, no one are there, but not quite yet. Yeah. So it's pretty,
it's, it's amazing stuff, man. Animal kingdom. What's the maximum, uh, when you say that,
how many does she have in reserve? Like how many could she have? That's a great question.
And I don't know the answer to it,
but I can tell you that in the literature,
there are very, very few instances
where six cubs have been documented
being born to a single mother in a given year.
So that seems to be about the max.
Six is like, you know,
like the less than once in a blue moon number.
What's the national average?
Two to three is really common.
Two to three is really common.
And imagine, you know, you asked about a national average.
Obviously, depending on where you are on the map,
you're going to have different food resources.
And then even in a given location,
year to year, it's highly variable.
Think about, you know, in a lot of these systems,
acorn mass crop is a key driver. So if
you're in a place that's, let's say got a lot of white Oak and it's a mast year, you should expect
those sows to have more fat and more cubs. And when it's a mast poor year and they're forced to
some relatively inferior calorie, poor food source. Lower body condition, fewer cubs.
Makes sense.
All right, hold it here for a minute.
Okay.
Yanni, any questions?
You cool on everything up to this point?
I'm cool.
I can tell you that where there won't be a lot of cubs coming out of the dens is here,
and that's in Kentucky and Tennessee.
That's right.
We know that firsthand.
Garrett, you straight?
Yep.
Still got that dip?
Yeah, I am curious about the 100-yard square,
like if that had a reason to it with the super sow.
Man.
Like how many, she denned how many times within a little chunk of ground?
Three times I visited that sow in this little area.
What were the three dens?
So two times, it was this interesting place.
It was on private property.
The landowner gave us permission to do the work.
If I remember right, it was the Pettus Farm was the name of this place. It was on private property. The landowner gave us permission to do the work. If I remember right, it was the Pettus Farm was the name of this place. And there were some stump
piles there. The farmer had cleared out some ag fields and piled up a bunch of stumps. So on two
of those occasions, the sow was in a stump pile, but it was not the same stump pile, two separate
stump piles. And then on the third occasion, she was above the ground and close to those stump piles just laying out just laying out with a pile of pile of yearlings
so how in the world does that work i don't know man but i can tell you like like how do they not
so it's just laying there like a dog could walk up and start eating the young if a dog walked up
and tried to start eating the young it would not go favorably for the dog.
Even though she's in a semi-stuporous state.
Yes.
And that's another sort of misconception.
When you approach a den,
and I should probably have prefaced the conversation
about so-called working up dens with a disclaimer,
like no one, if you find a bear den,
should be messing with it.
Just leave them alone, let them do their thing.
Now, when you come up to a den, it's not like the bear is laying there in suspended animation, oblivious to your presence.
The vast majority of the time, when I would get to the point of trying to figure out how many bears are in the den,
is the den above ground or below ground by the time i found the location
and was looking at the bear the bear was aware of my presence and looking back at me
clacking his jaw sometimes but aware it's not like they're you know completely
sedated already and you just walk up and give a sleeping bear a shot. They know you're there. And the,
the speed at which they can go from being in this metabolically, um, slow state to just being like
with it and running away, you know, is, is remarkable. I mean, they can, they can go from
idle or sub idle speed to full RPMs in in a matter of minutes it's really an amazing thing
that their bodies can do that's like me in the morning before a turkey hunt that's right he's
noticed that as long as he's got some of that great camp coffee yanni wakes me up and before
i can even think about getting up he's got the jet boils around and everything's happening you
guys run a tight ship you guys run a tight ship.
Now, Chris, are you cooling everything?
Yeah, man. Actually, I do have a question.
Bring it.
So, average is two to three cubs per
litter.
How many cubs,
how many litters can
a bear have in her lifetime?
Is it just one or is it...
It depends on one key variable,
which is how long she lives.
Oh, okay.
So.
But they can't, they don't do it every year though.
They do it every year.
No, that's exactly.
Well, typically that's right.
Yeah.
So bear in mind again, those cubs are born.
Let's say year one, the cubs are born.
Mama's got that responsibility for year two, right?
She's denning with them again.
So she can't give birth to a new litter
and care for last year's litter.
So that's why there's this cycle where it's a litter
and then it's rearing last year's litter
and then they're gone.
And then it's a litter and it's rearing that litter
and then they're gone.
And how old are they when it becomes sexually mature?
It depends on diet,
but you can have bears that are reproducing at two years of age.
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Yep.
So they're not doing this that many times.
Well, you could have a sow.
I shot a black bear boar one time.
They aged at 17.
I don't know how accurate that is.
I mean, they can live into their 20s.
It depends.
The biggest thing is honestly how hard hunted the population is.
Yeah.
That's like the leading cause of mortality.
Yeah. but you could in a situation where a sow has
avoided predation
and made it to her 20s
she might have had 8 litters
9 litters
so they can crank out a bunch
now this sow that I'm talking about
the super sow
I named her that
sweet
you're up all night I'm a fan of alliteration Who named her that? I named her that. Sweet. Because she was amazing.
You're up all night.
That would be the perfect name.
That would be the perfect name.
I'm a fan of alliteration, so it kind of has a ring to it.
She really stood out because I mentioned I visited her three times.
The first year I visited her, she had five cubs,
which was noteworthy in and of itself.
She's the only bear during my research project with five cubs ever.
And what did she weigh?
That's a good question.
I'd have to look at my notes again on that.
But she was big.
She was not like a monster, but she was in the neighborhood of 200, 220, somewhere in there.
So not like, holy cow, it's a humongous super sow.
Yeah, I wish I would have reread my paper on this if I knew I was going to get all these questions,
but it's a cool topic for sure.
So let's say she was in the neighborhood of 220 pounds.
All right.
She has five cubs.
That's big, but not extraordinary.
Yeah, it's a good, a nice big sow, healthy sow.
So she's got these five cubs.
The first time I'd seen that, really cool deal.
And so I'm looking at it from the standpoint of,
all right, here are five cubs now,
but next year I can come back
and I'll have five yearlings for my research project.
Because then when they're yearlings
and they emerge from the den,
that's when the family unit splinters, all right, breaks up.
And oftentimes that coincides
with the spring breeding season.
So the males are starting to chase mom around.
The yearlings don't want to be in the neighborhood anymore.
Mom isn't caring for them anymore.
And the females will typically go a relatively short distance
when they disperse.
Sometimes their home ranges as adults
will even overlap a little bit
with the home range of their mothers.
And those young males can go phenomenal distances,
like on the order of tens to hundreds of miles they'll cover
and then set up shop in a new place.
So I've got five bears that I'm hoping the following winter
I'll be able to put GPS collars on for my research project.
But the odds are slim that's going to happen.
Yeah.
She's good.
They're all going to live. Well, I shouldn't say the odds are slim that's going to happen. Yeah. She's good. They're all going to live.
Well, I shouldn't say the odds are slim
because we actually had pretty high survivorship
of bears that we found as cubs
and then relocated as yearlings.
Most of them survived.
Gotcha.
But, you know, you got your hands full
with five offspring to deal with.
I come back to the den the next year
hoping to find five yearlings.
There are five yearlings.
And not only are there five yearlings,
but they're big.
Like they've thrived.
They've done really, really well.
What's big?
Like a hundred pounds.
Okay.
So they've gone from five pounds to a hundred pounds in a year.
And the males were bigger than the females.
The females, you know, 70 pounds, let's say.
So there's 700 pounds worth of bears.
A pile of bears. Yes.
A 700 pound blob of black bears. A heap of black bears. Six of them. Yeah. Six bears all piled up.
That's incredible. So one of my grad school colleagues, a guy named Dave McFarland, who's
working for the Wisconsin DNR now as an ecologist, He and I were tasked with getting those bears handled and collared.
And those five became subjects of my research. And then another year goes by and I go back in
to this same sow. She's done in that same general. And she has five newborn cubs again.
So she has successive litters of quintuplets.
And that's amazing in and of itself.
Furthermore, we weighed her that first year.
We weighed her the second year.
We weighed her the third year.
And over the course of birthing and weaning those 10 cubs,
she put on the order of 50 pounds of weight.
Gaining weight.
Gaining weight while cranking out calories like nobody's business.
So that's how she got the moniker of Supercell.
Yeah, so back-to-back litters of quintuplets.
I mean, 10 cubs over the span of three years.
And then I started getting stories too.
One of the coolest stories
was from some Wisconsin Department of Transportation guys
who had seen the Sal with those five yearlings.
And they were going and scavenging deer carcasses
that the DOT guys had picked up
and taken to like a dump site. So that was her secret. Well, that was part of her secret. The
other part of it was she was living in this landscape where there's corn, like 50% corn
and 50% oak forest. And she's just translating all those calories into bare biomass through her reproduction.
But now, didn't she do it again though?
So what she did again was rear those five cubs to the point that they were yearlings and dispersed. And at that point, I was done tracking that sow.
Did any of the 10 that you watched her bring to... Yearlinghood?
Yearlinghood.
Did any go south?
Yes.
What percent went south?
So out of those 10 specific cubs,
I do not know the answer to that.
But I can tell you that there was a statistically significant
skewing of the data
where the bears were moving
in a southerly and easterly direction from that
sort of central forest part of the state like like moving initially or winding up winding up
winding up yeah they were they were checking for territory and finding unoccupied locations
i yes that's certainly true and i think one of the things driving it was not only were they
finding unoccupied locations but they were finding unoccupied locations with ad libitum.
In other words, unlimited food supply and no competition.
And another really cool thing that happened because these GPS collars, you know, they've just revolutionized wildlife research.
Because rather than going out there with like an antenna and trying to locate the radio signal, you're just getting thousands and thousands of locations.
And I had a handful of bears that made these really interesting forays into totally new areas where they'd never been before.
And distances of dozens, sometimes as much as 40 or 50 miles.
And then they'd return to the area where they were born.
And then they'd go back to that place they were born. And then they'd go
back to that place that they had explored and set up shop there. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Come back to
get their stuff. Well, I, you know, I think it was like get their stuff out of storage, you know,
again, trying to try to get, I got to go to storage. You know, you know, it's hard to get
in the mind of a bear, but go find a spot. If for whatever reason, come back where they came from.
Yeah. And then go back to their spot.
Yeah.
Do you want to see some of these data points?
Well, I will, but not right now.
But I'd love to.
All right.
I looked at one time.
If you want to share, we'd put some of these up for listeners to go check out.
Because I also find this link where I looked at one time how a wolverine uses a mountain for a year.
Yeah. And it was just his marks of all the places he went on a mountain.
Yeah.
Which was, looking at it,
seemed like very haphazard.
Yeah.
But probably made some kind of sense to him.
Yeah.
You know.
There's got to be a reason for it, man.
So one pioneering bear.
Yep.
The Wisconsin Super Sal.
Moves into a new area.
Semi-new?
Yeah.
I mean, she was at the southern extent of what you consider like the core bear range of the state. And in the course of four years, produces 10 offspring weighing 100 pounds.
Some of them move south more.
So if you see a bear, you listeners show up in your neighborhood
think of Carl
they're coming
Carl you can do your thoughts last
here's the deal
you're going to have to come back on though
I'm down for that
we didn't even talk to you about what I was going to talk to you about
we'll do it again
Yanni we didn't even talk to you about what I was going to talk to you about. Let's we'll do it again.
Yanni.
I'm doing my job here.
Petting a dog.
Garrett's rubbing his tummy.
What do you got? Yeah.
It's kind of general broad but i love the fact that we're doing
like biology and science equals hunting like that's just awesome for me and i hope we can
continue to do that and have more biologists on but on the digital radio program on the digital
radio program but yeah man i feel like all hunters should be thinking with this mind frame and looking at it that way.
I hear you, man.
It's so advantageous.
I recently gave a talk at a thing.
After I gave this talk, as I was preparing for my talk, I was noticing my wife, for what she was doing, she was working on a project, and she had a lot of unusual magazines around our house.
And I noticed a big thing in magazines.
Anyone who stands in a checkout line will see this.
Everything's like top, you know, seven things to make for dinner.
Or like 49 ways to blow your man's mind in bed.
Or like 101, you know what I mean?
Like lists are big.
And my wife was even telling me
that an odd numbered list
does better than an even numbered list.
People, when you say top 10,
people think they're being bullshitted.
If you say 11, they're like,
ooh, like why 11?
And they want to read it more. So anyhow, at the end of my thing i had seven things that
i think hunters should be doing and one of those seven was why not spend more time learning about
ecology and biology like from real places do you know what i mean yeah like especially if you can
figure out how to read the abstracts
of peer-reviewed wildlife journals.
If nothing else,
you'd be a better guy to talk to in a bar.
Because you'd be like, you know what?
You'd be the kind of guy that gets to go like this.
You'd be saying, you know what?
That's not how it works.
That's not exactly what happens.
You're wrong.
I read it in a peer-reviewed journal.
Is that it for your concluding thought?
Yes, sir.
Garrett?
To coattail that, it was very enjoyable to hunt and hike with Carl because of that fact.
Like little tidbits you'd point out that you knew because of your studies that otherwise
would have gone unnoticed by someone like me.
Dude's a wealth of knowledge.
He introduced me to the word mesic, and then the opposite of mesic is xeric with an x so carl was what was describing a ridgetop as being mesic
meaning it was relatively moist by southwestern standards yeah so this is one of the things we
didn't get to talk about carl is uh tell me what you i know what you do but just give me give me
tell everybody what you do all right so we So we're living. I work as the Southwestern regional wildlife ecologist for
the forest service. So pretty much anything related to wildlife monitoring and research
type stuff in the Southwest, Arizona, New Mexico on the forest services, 20.6 million acres of land
is under the purview of my position. And by those 20.6 million acres of
forest service land, I mean the land that belongs to all of your listeners, to all the listeners,
to everybody around this table. And in a way, the world's people. That's true. Because if you're a
German and you come over here, they're not like, oh, let me see your passport. Even a German can
go out there. Chris, got any concluding thoughts?
Yeah, I learned that you shouldn't go working up a bear den without some sort of poking stick.
He made a personal note.
I saw you make a little note on your phone.
Excuse me a minute.
I got to call my wife.
Tell her to remind me of something when I get home.
Carl, concluding thoughts?
I agree wholeheartedly that, you know, I think hunters,
I think hunters do innately have a desire to know more
about the places and the species that they hunt.
So they have the desire to know more.
I think so.
I think it's a natural thing, a natural fascination.
And that was what, it was experiences as a hunter
and fishermen and just kid growing up outside
that led me on this career track.
And this career track feeds directly back
into how I appreciate those activities
even more now than I did then. It's
like a, it's a, a feedback loop of sorts. The more I learn, the more I like to hunt, the more I hunt,
the more I want to learn, you know? And if people feel that intrigue, if that's something that
resonates with folks, you should, you should explore that. When you're out there, you should take the time to note a question
that you have and pursue additional information. And you should be trying to find ways as individuals
to be more than takers from these places. If there's a place from which you are taking a resource, you should feel like you have a stewardship responsibility.
Yes. My concluding thought is, I love it that, and I didn't know about this, I knew roughly this
about you, but I didn't know all the way about you, that you got your start on your own hunting
squirrels. You're darn right. Carl was telling me in Michigan, where Carl grew up and I did too,
deer season opener is November 15th.
And Carl's telling me about one time he went out on a squirrel stroll on November 15th
and got hollered at by a deer hunter, which I kind of love.
But you turned a love of squirrel hunting into doing very important work
in our understanding and preservation of wildlife.
I appreciate the kind words, but I...
Squirrel hunter to bear den digger.
I would counter that squirrel hunting
is in and of itself important work.
Yes.
That point well taken.
There you have it.
Wisconsin Super Sow,
Dr. Carl, Malcolm.
Can people look up your work online?
Sure.
Do they got to go to JSTOR and pay for it, or can they find stuff?
There's some stuff on there for free.
Can they find the abstract of the SuperSow story?
Yeah.
We'll put some stuff online to you, man.
That sounds good.
We'll put stuff online, and we'll put some of those little maps
showing these bears roaming around.
Let's do that.
Yep.
All right.
Next time, Carl's going to talk about stuff that he's been doing recently
and not stuff he did a long time ago.
Sounds good, buddy.