Brodie Farquhar muses about hibernation and and two recent stories about it.

Nap Time For Yellowstone Bears, But Others Still Awake. New West

He wishes he could talk to Yellowstone grizzly biologists to see if warming is causing the bears to hibernate for shorter periods. I don’t know, but I do know that the availability of wolf kills of winter weakened bison in the Pelican has resulted in the bears coming out early to share and often take the kills from Mollies Pack.

We helped fund the Pelican late winter study for a couple years.

If the availability of food wakes them up, then I would think that warming will have, and probably has had, the same effect.

 
About The Author

Ralph Maughan

Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.

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Quote

‎"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."

~ Edward Abbey

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