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Ben Kilham and his sister Phoebe are the only licensed bear rehabilitators in the state of New Hampshire. For over twenty-five years, the Kilham Bear Center has taken in orphaned or injured black bear cubs and successfully released them back into the wild. And Ben has conducted arguably the longest scientific study of black bear behavior in history.
Until Ben Kilham, black bears were studied mostly using tracking collars. But Ben has spent decades following bears in the woods, sometimes for nine hours at a time. As his orphan cubs acclimate to their natural environment, he watches them. He naps when they nap, he moves when they move, and he studies their complex social behaviors. One of his very first cubs, Squirty, is twenty-four years old this year. She lives in woods near his home, and he’s watched her become a mother, and now a grandmother. Bear biologists have generally assumed that black bears were solitary animals. Ben Kilham has proven them very wrong.
Links
Kilham Bear Center: the place for all information on the rehabilitation program, Ben’s research, videos and books for sale….
Cubs Video: I could not figure out how to attach more video. For more, go to Ben’s website above…
The photos below are lent to Rumble Strip by Ben. Please don’t copy. Thank you!….:
Just discovered your podcast and I have been loving it. I especially loved this episode, listening to it twice, back to back. Thank you for such excellent podcasting!
Thank you Jennifer!
Bear Man was very interesting listening. I have been looking for a podcast that interviews non-celebrities and here it is. Thanks, Jennifer!
This is just so, so, so good and so important. My son and I have been reading Erin Hunter’s The Seekers series and I asked him to listen to this episode and he did. He said he loved it except that the bit about the brother mourning the sister bear made him sad. I talked about this episode in the college class I teach today, because I think we can (and should) work this story about non-humans into pretty much everything we talk about.
I ran into him while cruising timber in western NH – he was tracking radio collared bears from a 4 wheeler. A great soul on so many levels.