Grizzly
Bears preparing for the Solar Eclipse |
MEXUS Scenic Byway Advertising for Pinedale
Are
Grizzly Bears preparing for the Solar Eclipse?
“Typically
when grizzly bears emerge from their winter dens the mothers
take their young to scavenge off winter killed
wildlife. That happened this year too, but then we started to
see some very unusual movement pattern in our radio collar tracking
data,” said John Patterson of the Wyoming Grizzly Bear
Tracking Institute.
Grizzly
bears hibernate in the winter as a way of getting through the
cold and snow of the worst weather months. Depending on
snowfall, temperature and food supply, the bears in Wyoming
typically make
their way to their dens in late November and emerge again in
early spring, staying in their den for as many as five months.
During that time they do not eat, drink, defecate or urinate,
living off a layer of fat they build up during the summer and
late fall months. The mother gives birth to her cubs in the
winter den while she is in hibernation, often having twins
or triplets.
Reports of signs of grizzly bears emerging from their dens
began in late March this year.
This spring, wildlife scientists have been able to watch the
live movement patterns of many of these bears as they emerge,
thanks to being many years into a radio collaring research program.
Each collared bear shows up as a moving yellow dot on their monitors
and is plotted on spatial
maps. With time,
movement patterns start
to emerge.
“After
about two weeks after emerging this spring, the yellow dots
showing the bear movements began to align in strange linear
and circular
patterns,” Patterson
said. “We began to see groups of yellow dots come together,
then move off in certain directions, hold a pattern for awhile,
and then disperse into random placement patterns again,” he
said.
What
is odd about these patterns is that they suggest some level
of cooperative
ritual or foraging behavior in these grizzly bears, which
has never been seen before.
“Wolves
will pack hunt,” Patterson
said. “They will drive and run down their prey to separate
the old and the weak in a herd,” he explained. “But
we’ve never seen pack hunting in grizzly bears before,
so we're leaning more to this being some kind of a topographical
or environmentally influenced phenomenon. Mother grizzly bears
will spend a lot of time in the spring teaching their young
how to hunt. In the past 150 years or so
since the large herds of bison disappeared the hunting pattern
has been for bears to feed on winter or road kill of lone or
weaker prey
in isolated
encounter incidents. The mother bear teaches her cubs how
to hunt and where to find the best food sources, such as favored
huckleberry patches in each drainage of their
home range.
Scientists
are unsure of what the radio collar data is showing this
year, Patterson said. The activity appears to be only happening
with
bears
in
the Upper Green River Valley area, specifically seemingly centering
on the Union Pass area of the northern Wind River Range. The
round pattern alignments seem to encircle Union Pass at times
and then disperse. Other linear alignments seem to pattern
from Union
Pass down along the Green River to about the edge of the forest
boundary and then stop. “Sometimes we actually see two
parallel linear alignments take shape along the Green River corridor
as if lining up on both sides of an imaginary centerline,” Patterson
said. Tracking data for bears in the southern Wind River Range
this spring does not appear to show any of these kinds of alignment
patterns.
No
one seems to have been able to come up with an explanation
for the odd
bear movements this spring. “There are a lot
of grizzly bears up there,” Patterson said, “and
just because we are seeing what appear to be gatherings and spatial
alignments doesn’t mean that is what we are actually seeing.
We could be completely misinterpreting these data patterns,” he
said. It
is anticipated things will quickly return to normal as summer
progresses and more favored food sources ripen and become available.
Scientists
will continue to monitor the phenomenon through the summer,
Patterson said. Some have suggested they are reading much more
into the alignment patterns than is really there, like seeing
the face of a man when looking at the moon.
The
Upper Green is expected to become a busy place this summer
as visitors start to arrive into the area for the upcoming
solar eclipse
that
will be
occurring
on August
21st, Tens of thousands of people are expected to pour into
the area which is in the heart of "the totality" of
the eclipse black-out coverage zone. Pinedale will have many
fun events going
on all weekend in town and special viewing stations are being
set up for those going to more remote locations to get away
from city lights for the best viewing experience.
Leading
bear expert Boris Sanders from the Grizzly Federation said
it looks to him like this is group hunting behavior we
haven't seen since the large herds of the buffalo. Somehow
the bears might know about the upcoming eclipse too, and
they are doing practice runs for the herds of visitors.
Patterson
dismissed Sanders' theory as ridiculous and said he didn’t
feel there was any reason for visitors coming to the area
to be
at all
concerned about this preliminary bear data. “The
bears will in all likelihood scatter to the far corners as
usual once people start to flock into the area the weekend
of the eclipse. People have absolutely nothing to be concerned
about with this.”
Tourism
Board purchases advertising panels for Pinedale on MEXUS
border wall
With
the Trump administration announcing they will be
offering opportunities for the public to lease individual
panels on
the U.S. side of the US-Mexico border wall, people have been
getting very creative coming up with ideas for how they can
use the tall and wide vertical spaces in imaginative ways.
The Wyoming Tourism Department has partnered with the MEXUS
Scenic Byway administration to offer 50/50 matching grants
to organizations and businesses who would like to invest in
a panel. The cost for the annual lease for a space is quite
reasonable, as the government is hoping to not only recover
some of the cost to taxpayers of building the wall, but also
to promote the 700 miles of the scenic walking path along the
international border. The Pinedale Tourism Board has commissioned
ten advertising panels to be located in high traffic and visibility
areas along the international border wall which are expected
to be seen by millions of people annually.
Some people
have already begun to think outside the box and explore creative
ways to take advantage of very large vertical
surfaces to become functional spaces beyond being barriers.
A “Reimagining the Wall’ movement
has spread across the nation and even gone international
with people finding
imaginative ways to transform plain walls into functional
surfaces such as signs, vertical gardens, and canvases where
artists
can express their creative talents with large format murals.
Gardening
enthusiasts have been signing up for a chance to use panels
for the newest fad in space conserving gardening called "vertical
gardening." As acreage for traditional farming and gardening
is taken up by housing developments, less and less space
is available for large farming operations. The concept of
going up instead of out has appealed to those who live in
cities and apartment dwellers who have limited space available
for plants. With the concept that everyone has wall space,
creative gardeners have begun to not only refine the gardening
techniques but an entire cottage industry has been born based
off the idea of using wall space to grow a garden. The international
border wall offers not only recreational gardening space
for those who live along the border, but also a potential
income generating opportunity on both sides of the border
for area inhabitants. Piping systems are already being installed
to bring drip irrigation to remote panels at a nominal additional
fee.
Some
exercising enthusiasts have even suggested making climbing wall
routes on the US side of the international border wall since
it is thought there will be little liklihood of burdening
Mexico with reverse illegal immigration
traffic
from people recreating
on the climbing wall equipment.
The
Pinedale Tourism Board has released a conceptual for some
of the mural panels for the new advertising campaign.
The
focus will be to try to entice people recreating along
the MEXUS scenic byway with photos of the breathtaking
Sublette
County scenery and western way of life, playing off the
clever “That’s
WY!” campaign by the State. A Tourism Board spokesperson
said they have had tremendous response to the two large
billboards on Interstate 80 to entice people coming from
Denver and Salt
Lake City to come through Pinedale on their way to Yellowstone
and Grand Teton Park. Once approved, the panels will go into
production and will be placed at locations along the
border wall by mid-summer.
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