by UC Berke­ley Pub­lic Affairs

BERKELEY—The life and con­tri­bu­tions of wildlife ecol­ogy pio­neer Aldo Leopold are show­cased in a new doc­u­men­tary, Green Fire, which gets its West Coast pre­miere Mon­day, Feb. 28, at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive the­ater.

The film’s title draws on the epochal moment in Leopold’s life, when the young ranger wit­nessed the “fierce green light” in a dying wolf’s eyes flare and fade out — and expe­ri­enced an instant con­ver­sion to a land ethic. It tells the tale of how Leopold grew from an Iowa farm boy who loved to hunt into a leg­endary forester, edu­ca­tor, envi­ron­men­tal advo­cate and piv­otal fig­ure in the con­ser­va­tion move­ment of the first half of the 20^th century.

Two of his sons went on to become dis­tin­guished pro­fes­sors in con­ser­va­tion fields at Berke­ley, zool­o­gist and wildlife ecol­o­gist A. Starker Leopold and his younger brother Luna Leopold, a hydrol­o­gist. The older brother estab­lished Berkeley’s Sage­hen Creek Field Sta­tion north of Truc­kee in 1951 for nat­ural sci­ence research and edu­ca­tion, and his name now graces a chair in wildlife biol­ogy in the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence, Pol­icy and Man­age­ment, cur­rently held by con­ser­va­tion biol­ogy pro­fes­sor Steven Beissinger. Sage­hen Creek Field Sta­tion is one of 36 reserves that are part of the UC Nat­ural Reserve System.

Sage­hen is co-sponsoring Monday’s Green Fire pre­miere. The 5:30 p.m. screen­ing was all but sold out as of Thurs­day (tick­ets are free but seats had to be reserved). But a sec­ond screen­ing at 7:30 p.m. is first-come-first-served, with seat allo­ca­tion start­ing at 5:30 p.m. Mon­day, accord­ing to Sage­hen direc­tor Jeff Brown.

The web­site for the doc­u­men­tary has been over­whelmed by recent traf­fic. Instead, the trailer for Green Fire can be viewed here. More infor­ma­tion is avail­able by con­tact­ing events@sbcouncil.

For black bears 8495 and 8496, inde­pen­dence day will always be Jan­u­ary 26, 2011. That’s when these two orphaned cubs were released back to the wild at Sage­hen Creek Field Sta­tion by the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Fish and Game. The site’s pro­tected bound­aries gives the cubs a safe place where they can learn to live on their own.

“Sage­hen is in the mid­dle of some of the most pris­tine bear habi­tat we have in Cal­i­for­nia,” said Marc Kenyon, the DFG’s statewide black bear, moun­tain lion, and wild pig coor­di­na­tor. “The roads are cleared to a point, and we have con­trol over pub­lic access so we know the bears will not be has­sled dur­ing the main part of the win­ter.” The depart­ment has released a total of eight orphaned cubs at Sage­hen since 2004.

This year’s two female cubs were sep­a­rated from their moth­ers last sum­mer in the Tahoe basin. Both were less than 50 pounds, indi­cat­ing they were born that year. Nei­ther was habit­u­ated to humans. These two char­ac­ter­is­tics qual­i­fied them for California’s bear reha­bil­i­ta­tion pro­gram. Older bears accus­tomed to human food and dwellings are not so lucky. Such ani­mals are relo­cated to zoos or put down as a last resort because they pose a dan­ger to the public.

Since they were found, the cubs have been housed together at the Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care facil­ity. The facil­ity kept them away from peo­ple and fed them wild foods includ­ing chokecher­ries, man­zanita berries, sedges, rushes, and grasses.

“They’ve learned the appro­pri­ate foods and the hope is when they’re out here, they can rec­og­nize those foods by smell,” Kenyon said. On this diet, the bears had grown to roughly the size of Ger­man shep­herds, about 85 and 70 pounds respectively.

The cubs had stopped receiv­ing meal ser­vice sev­eral weeks ear­lier.  “The reha­bil­i­ta­tion cen­ter stops feed­ing them in Decem­ber to kick start their hiber­na­tion mode. It trig­gers them to go to sleep,” said Cristen Langner, the DFG wildlife biol­o­gist respon­si­ble for the Lake Tahoe unit. DFG places reha­bil­i­tated cubs into win­ter dens, where they can snooze out the remain­der of the sea­son. This tac­tic “will help habit­u­ate them to the wild and a par­tic­u­lar spot rather than going out and imme­di­ately get­ting into trou­ble,” Langer said.

On release day, DFG wildlife biol­o­gists anes­thetized and mea­sured the cubs, then added bright num­bered tags and a radio trans­mit­ter to their ears. The drowsy ursines were then bun­dled into an open-air trailer, gray blan­kets tucked around their brown fur, and towed slowly past Truc­kee and onto the snowy grounds of Sage­hen reserve.

Once the trailer gate was raised, the drowsy cubs began to stir. They occa­sion­ally opened their eyes, licked their lips, and stretched out a paw or two. Even at this ten­der age, their bare palms end in stout curved claws.

The larger cub propped her heavy head against the metal side of the trailer, reveal­ing her new acces­sories. The effect was big jew­elry with a techno twist—the transmitter’s slim black antenna edged just past the tip of her ear. The trans­mit­ter will allow DFG per­son­nel to fol­low both cubs for about a year after their release. Cubs released at Sage­hen in pre­vi­ous years have wan­dered up to 70 miles away before their trans­mit­ters died.

The drowsy cubs were lifted from the trailer onto a sledge, which was then loaded onto the back of the Sage­hen snow­cat. Reserve man­ager Jeff Brown motored the vehi­cle as near as he could to the release site. Then biol­o­gists unloaded the sledge and pulled all 155 pounds of bear up to the den.

The den itself con­sisted of a plas­tic dog igloo buried in a snow­bank. One DFG biol­o­gist lined the igloo with hay, then climbed inside. Two oth­ers hefted first one cub, then another, from the sledge, and arranged both ani­mals into cozy balls inside the den. They placed fresh cut pine boughs in front of the door­way, then acti­vated the motion sen­si­tive cam­era strapped to a tree sev­eral feet away.

“We’ll get some funny pic­tures play­ing in front of the den for the next cou­ple of weeks—until they tear the cam­era off the tree. That’s what hap­pened last year,” Kenyon said.

The biol­o­gists expect the bears to awaken in a cou­ple of days, explore their sur­round­ings, then return to the den. Black bears will arise from hiber­na­tion on warm win­ter days to seek food, but spend most of their time asleep until spring makes food plen­ti­ful enough to war­rant stay­ing awake.

“The rein­tro­duc­tions give indi­vid­ual bears a sec­ond chance at being a wild bear. And as long as they’re not reported to get into people’s stuff, they can do what­ever they want out here.” Langner says.

A slide show of the bear release.

Updated pho­tos of the bears will be posted at the Sage­hen Creek Field Sta­tion bear news blog.

The Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Fish and Game’s statewide black bear pol­icy.