Sweden : Rewards

Update from our Sweden bear volunteer project

We have been working hard, finding bear dens in difficult places, investigating the sites where tracked bears have spent time on one spot and then returning to base to enter the hard-won data into the computer. The rewards for this work come from the pleasure of contributing to a research programme that forms the basis for brown bear conservation action – but also good company, excellent food, the beauty of the Swedish forest, and a small break we enjoyed together on day 6.

Conveniently near to a bear day bed site we needed to visit that day, is a delightful spot where the river Voxnan rushes down through a rocky gorge in a forest of pine and birch. Here we all met up for a mid-expedition celebratory lunch of pea soup and pancakes – the traditional Swedish Thursday meal – cooked on a camp fire. Some of the team insisted on immersing themselves in the cold waters of the calmer parts of the river.

Yesterday, Andrea gave one team an extra job to do. She wanted to know if a particular bear family of mother and two yearling cubs had split up or not. The GPS data from mother and one cub gave recent locations, but had not been updating recently. The second cub did not have a GPS collar, so his location was simply unknown. But all three bears did have radio tracking devices, so our mission was to try and locate all three bears in real time using a directional radio receiver and triangulate the results on a map. This took more time, care and luck than we anticipated! A bear lurking behind a rock or moving off while we are in the middle of trying to locate it can make the whole exercise very difficult. We did at least obtain some partial results showing the cubs in the same approximate area as each other, with the location of mother bear uncertain. Such are the practical realities of conservation research. Some of us ended that long day with a much-earned sauna in the woods at base camp.

Sweden bear conservation holiday update