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Other than biologists, few humans have entered bears’ dens to find out how cozy they might be. But in one case I am intimately acquainted with, a rabbit-hunting beagle wandered under a brush pile in the Maine woods, which happened to be the den of a black bear with her two cubs. The beagle attempted to retreat, but every time the dog tried to crawl out, the bear dragged it back inside. The sow acted as though the beagle was one of her cubs. The owner finally retrieved his dog unharmed, but only after the bear was tranquilized with a dart gun and the dog had then been denned for two days longer than it intended.

The second inadvertent entry into a bear’s den that I heard about involved a man. And it ended with a hastier exit. The man apparently broke through the snow and fell into a cavern on Ellesmere Island that happened to be the den of a polar bear with cubs. The heavily padded man (lucky for him, he was wearing his microclimate!) was quickly and summarily heaved back out with one swat of the bear’s great paw.

In the woods on the hills near my cabin in Maine, I commonly see what are popularly called bear “nests” up in beech trees. These I have entered, or examined closely, without being molested. They are platforms of branches that the bears pull toward themselves from all around to strip off the beechnuts when the trees still have their leaves. Leaf-shedding by trees is an active process in preparation for winter (to reduce ice-and snow-loading), and a broken and killed branch does not shed its leaves because the tree’s physiology is disrupted. As a consequence, where bears have been foraging for still unripe beechnuts in late summer one sees in November what superficially look like giant squirrel dreys (a name for squirrel nests) with many dead leaves. Structurally, the bear dreys are almost identical to chimp sleeping nests, the best constructions that any of our closest living relatives are able to produce.

06

FLYING SQUIRRELS IN A HUDDLE

One April I found young northern flying squirrels (Glaucomys sabrinus) with still-closed eyes, and I adopted one of the litter. Fed on Similac baby formula with an eyedropper, the tiny waif grew quickly. It often slept in my shirt pocket when I carried it to my office and occasionally to the campus dairy bar, where I enticed it out onto the countertop to lap up ice cream. Outgrowing my pocket, it later lived in a spare bedroom, where it slept all day in a hollow log. When I entered the room after dark, it ran up to a ceiling beam and jumped off to glide through the air and land on my chest with a light thump. When jumping from hundred-foot trees, northern flying squirrels can glide over three hundred feet, given suitable slope and wind.

Like my father’s pet weasel, my squirrel died in an unfortunate accident. I had put sprigs of geranium into a jar with water. One evening when the squirrel was free in the living room, it crawled down the cut geranium stems and drank from the water they were in. A little later the little animal was retching: it had been poisoned by the plant’s chemical defenses. The next morning my charming pet was stone dead. Animals that to us appear to have astounding toughness, such as surviving in the winter world, are also extraordinarily fragile, each in its own way.

Northern flying squirrels are common across North America from the Canadian maritimes all the way to Alaska, and they survive the harshest winters. Whatever it is that flying squirrels do to live through northern winters it does not involve the usual tricks of storing food, getting fat, or hibernating. Furthermore, my tame ice-cream-lapping flying squirrel notwithstanding, these animals are normally strictly nocturnal. One might predict instead that they “should” try to avoid night activity to avoid low temperatures by then resting in their snug nests, yet in the wild they sleep away the day even when temperatures are reasonable. They come out of their snug nests only when the sun goes down and temperatures dip sharply. I have no answer to