Interested in bears? Here’s a reading list
Learning the facts about the wildlife that meanders through your backyards, tips over the garbage can or does damage to the chicken run, is the best way to adapt to the presence of those animals, because it’s a two-way process. Here are some books that may help you to understand the black bear … and make cohabitation easier.
Living with bears
By Linda Masterson
A highly acclaimed guide and narrative for its insight into the black bear. Everything from understanding the black bear and its behavior to bear-proofing your home, and hiking, camping and playing in bear country. Recommended by National Park wildlife biologists, the Audubon Society and the National Be Bear Aware campaign.
Walking with bears
By Terry D. DeBruyn, Ph.D.
Recommended and applauded by Jane Goodall, this is the author’s experience with three generations of black bear mothers and their offspring. After pioneering a GPS system to track collared bears in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, he took his research one step further by walking with these bears from 1990–1999 in the state’s longest running black bear research project.
Among the bears
By Benjamin Kilham
Kilham is known world-wide for his work rehabilitating orphaned and injured bear cubs at his facility in Lyme, N.H. His work has been featured in BBC documentaries, Animal Planet documentaries and in the iMax movie, Pandas. Because of his years-long record of success with black bear cubs, he was invited to advise Chinese bear biologists on returning captive-born pandas to the wild in the mountains of Sichuan, China. He traveled to China and spent many months working with the government financed program to re-establish pandas in the wild. The movie Pandas is available online.
In the company of bears
By Benjamin Kilham
An eye-opening book that offers insight into the daily lives, sophisticated communications, and interactions between bears that allows them to share territory and food through alliances and conduct codes. The research and subjects’ lives and adventures add interesting and amusing antidotes to the book. The book has had excellent scientific reviews.