News > BIO > Fall 2007

Alumni profile

A walk in the woods

Lynn Rogers has spent his life researching black bears in their element

The blip on the radio-tracking receiver is picking up a strong signal and Lynn Rogers is calling to one of a dozen bears he tracks just outside of Ely, Minnesota. We’re at the end of a muddy road in a soft rain under a green canopy of pine, spruce and birch. Giant mosquitoes are having their way with me. I flap my arms around in a hopeless attempt to keep them at bay. Rogers, who received both his M.S. (’70) and Ph.D. (’77) from the University of Minnesota’s then Department of Ecology and Behavioral Biology, has spent four decades studying black bears on their turf. He’s unfazed by conditions he’s endured many times in his quest to uncover the private life of Ursus americanus.

When Rogers started his research career as a doctoral student specializing in the ecology of black bears for a project run by the Bell Museum of Natural History, he says, “nobody had a clue about the behavior of solitary animals [like the black bear].” He’s part of a vanguard of researchers, including Jane Goodall, Brian Bertram and Ian Hamilton, who paved the way for a whole field of study. Biologist E. O. Wilson characterized their efforts as bringing a new level of resolution to the study of large solitary mammals “in which free-ranging individuals are tracked from birth through socialization, parturition and death, and their idiosyncrasies, personal alliances and ecological relationships recorded in clinical detail.”

Despite the accolades, Rogers offers a humble assessment of his life’s work infused with a healthy dose of awe for the complexity and variability of black bear biology and ecology. “When I started, I thought I knew a lot more about bears than I do now,” he says; this from a man who has spent entire 24-hour periods alone in the forest with these hefty mammals. While still a graduate student, he helped gain big game status for bears, which meant more regulation and, ultimately, a boost in the bear population in the state from less than 6,000 in the early 1970s to more than 24,000 today. He studied bears in their environment as a wildlife biologist for the Forest Service, eventually forming the Wildlife Research Institute field station where he continues a multi-generation bear study.

Rogers is an unlikely candidate for wildlife research stardom in some ways. He jokes about not being taken seriously as a student, but evidence of his intellectual curiosity and non-stop work ethic bubbles up in anecdotes about his path as a researcher. He grew up poor in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, spent years as a mail carrier trying to save for college and eventually took retirement and used the money to complete his undergraduate studies. He got a job capturing nuisance bears where he met a University of Minnesota professor who asked him to apply for a new grad student position. The rest is history. He arrived at the University of Minnesota in1968 and finished his doctorate in 1977. “I almost got tenure as a grad student,” he jokes.

Rogers’ passion for bear research culminated in the opening of the North American Bear Center in Ely last spring; a labor of love made possible, says Rogers, by his wife Donna and a devoted community of amateur bear researchers and enthusiasts. The center showcases rare video of black bears vocalizing, playing, sleeping and eating in the wild. It’s something you can’t see anywhere else, he notes.

Rogers was spurred by the misconceptions and mischaracterizations of bears that pervade American culture, from the illustrations of growling grizzlies on the attack on the cover of Outdoor Life magazine to TV’s Gentle Ben. “The black bear story is a lot like the gorilla story,” Rogers says. “We thought gorillas were ferocious until researchers learned that they are mostly gentle. We’re learning the same thing about black bears.”

Back in the woods, Rogers finally hones in on June, a female black bear. He calls to her once again. Down in a gully, a large black lump at the base of a tall pine shifts slightly, June looks up and decides to ignore his call. Two cubs perch high in the tree; a family in repose. It takes me a moment to spot them not more than 20 yards away. “The people who live here don’t even know the bears are here,” Rogers says. Peering into the cascade of brown and green, calling to June, Rogers is in his element.

—Stephanie Xenos

Go to www.bear.org for more about the North American Black Bear Center.