North American Bear Center
Jun 30, 2021 12:00 PM
Dr.Lynn Rogers,Ph.D.
North American Bear Center

North American Bear Center founder and principal biologist, Dr. Lynn Rogers, Ph.D. (born April 9, 1939), has spent 50+ years studying wildlife behavior and ecology. Specializing in bears, he has senior-authored more peer-reviewed scientific articles on black bears than anyone. To follow the lives of over 300 bears in the vast forests of northeastern Minnesota he used airplanes, canoes, snowmobiles, and snowshoes; studying individual bears for up to 23 years. Along the way, he learned that black bears are not the ferocious animals some people think and that researchers can accompany them for data collection. He combined Jane Goodall’s trust-based research methods (Goodall 1971) with modern technology (telemetry, GPS, field computers, webcams, the internet, etc.) and turned his initial population study into a broad state-of-the-arts study of behavior, ecology, hibernation, vocalizations, body language, social organization, physiology, danger, and bear-human relations.

Rogers is also the founder and principal biologist of the Wildlife Research Institute (WRI) near Ely, Minnesota. Most of his published papers can be downloaded from the WRI website at bearstudy.org. Two of those papers (Rogers 1976, 1987) were ranked among the all-time top five contributions to the understanding of bears of all kinds, according to a worldwide survey of bear biologists by the International Bear Association (Martinka 1994).

Meeting Format: Onsite at the Grand Ely Lodge and via Zoom.