A Bear’s Eye View: A Day in the Life of a Bear from ADF&G on Vimeo.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game tried an interesting experiment over last summer: they attached a camera to a collar, then attached that collar to a grizzly bear living near the Copper River in Southcentral Alaska.
According to Fish and Game, the camera, operating on a timer, recorded 20 seconds of video and audio almost every 15 minutes from May to June in 2011. One of those days, May 26, has been chopped into a single continuous film reel, showing the bear’s activities over the course of that day. It’s not every single moment of the bear’s day, but some of the highlights.
So what does a bear — dubbed boar 6041 by Fish and Game — do with a lazy Thursday? Well, if the video is any indication, he does about what you’d expect a bear to do: he walks around, encounters other bears, sleeps, swims (or at least wades) and eats. Fast forward to around the 10-minute mark and you’ll see the bear enjoying a tasty moose meal — up close and personal.
The video is grainy, but Fish and Game has provided a handy walk-through to describe some of the bear’s activity, including demarcating the times of day (visible in the lower left corner of the video) that the bear is eating, sleeping, and mating, which boar 6041 does twice in the space of a day. Quite the ladies man, that boar 6041.
But May 26 wasn’t the only day documented by the camera. As Riley Woodford, information officer for Fish and Game’s Division of Wildlife Conservation, writes in a longer piece explaining the collar-camera study:
A sunny, pond-ice melting day in late May and Boar 6041 was not long out of hibernation. This mature, 700-pound brown bear smelled a sow, her breeding scent mixed with meat. Caribou, already dead. He found her, bred and ate caribou. Over the next few weeks, he bred many times with at least three other receptive sows, and likely more, in the Copper River Basin of Southcentral Alaska. He also killed and ate another bear, a number of newborn moose calves, a few caribou calves, a hare and a beaver – and he scavenged a dead moose and a pile of winter-killed fish.
Boar 6041 was not the only bear carrying a camera around. Three other bears — all sows, two each with a cub in tow — had cameras attached to their collars. Biologists hoped to better understand the impact that bears were having on the moose population in the area and how hunter harvest rates were impacting the bears.
Read much more about boar 6041′s activity at Fish and Game’s writeup on the video, and see the video at the original page, here. You can read more about the larger study here, and see other videos (including one of a sow play-fighting with its cub) here.
Video © 2012 Alaska Department of Fish and Game
courtesy of dv.com
