Remember your first Teddy Bear? Can you hum “The Bear Went Over the Mountain?” Love a good bear hug? No other animal has been more memorialized, more loved, and more vilified, by humans than the bear. Black bears, grizzly bears, polar bears, Gummi Bears, Care Bears. We love and fear bears all at the same time! On Thursday, August 25 at 6:30 pm Greg Holm, Terrestrial Ecologist at Crater Lake National Park will present an informational program at the East Bend Public Library about research he and his colleagues conducted on the black bears that use Crater Lake National Park. The program is free and open to the public as part of the outreach efforts of the Crater Lake National Park Trust.

In 2009, Holm and his fellow researches attempted to get a population estimate of black bears using Crater Lake National Park. The project involved setting up bear-hair collection devices across the entire park, checking hair traps and collecting bear-hair, then having the bear hair genetically analyzed to determine how many unique individual bears we found, and their sex. This year Holm and his crew are embarking on phase two of the project, which involves  capturing black bears and fitting them with GPS collars that will gather the bears location for a two year period. From the data collected Holm expects to get a better understanding of how and when black bears use the habitats of Crater Lake.

Holm has been with the National Park Service for 11 years, and has been at Crater Lake since the fall of 2008. Prior to Crater Lake, he spent eight years at Redwood National Park as a Wildlife Biologist. Holm has been learning as much as he can about the history of wildlife at Crater Lake, while also doing threatened and endangered species surveys and pursuing black bear research. Prior to working for the Park Service, he spent five years capturing and radio collaring grizzly and black bears for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. He received his B.S. (wildlife) from Humboldt State University and M.S. (zoology) from the University of Wyoming.

For more information about this or other library programs, please visit the library website at www.deschuteslibrary.org. People with disabilities needing accommodations (alternative formats, seating or auxiliary aides) should contact Liz at 312-1032.