The Bangor Daily News has run a news story of how students from Unity College in Maine, as part of an ongoing black bear study, are collecting bear data in the middle of winter and sharing their information with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. The story and pictures can be found here.
I have two quick comments to make about this story. First, this comment as reported by the Bangor Daily News from Lisa Bates, a biology technician.
This bear is about twice as big as the average Maine bear her age, according to Bates. That size is consistent with bears found in this area and is likely because there was plenty of food available during the summer and fall.
Please understand what she is saying. She says this particular bear is about two times bigger than the “average Maine bear her age.” Does that not tell us that the size of a bear must have something to do with geographic location?
She further states that even though this bear is twice the average size, it’s “consistent with bears found in this area.” So, why are bears in the region where Unity College students are studying them bigger than the state average?
Bates explains that it, “is likely because there was plenty of food available during the summer and fall.” Note that she did not say that there are millions of pounds of jelly donuts scattered all over the Unity area that’s making the bears fat.
Ignorant animal rights perverts are laying claim that if bear hunters would stop feeding bears through baiting stations, there wouldn’t be so many bears. Of course they have no data to prove such a claim, because there isn’t any.
The second comment I want to make about this report has to do with the use of a chainsaw to cut a big square hole in the middle of the tree the bear was hibernating in in order to extract the bear to collect data. Is this a common practice?
