Bear hair as a research tool
"There is a thin thread between this bear and me and to ground my science I run my hands along it, to remind myself of its form and the quiet folding and unfolding of time between my fingers and a wisp of a bear on a wire. "
Lauren Henson of the Raincoast Applied Conservation Science Lab at University of Victoria uses bear hair to research population structures of grizzly and black bears from the interior of B.C. to the coast. She just wrote an article about her connection to the bears.
There is necessity in connecting the invisible to the visible, from me transporting clear liquids between sterile tubes to the invisible ancestry of unknown ursids and back to a full, realized bear and her mother and her mother’s mother shaking snow from her coat in an estuary chilled by the outstretched foot of a glacier. There is a thin thread between this bear and me and to ground my science I run my hands along it, to remind myself of its form and the quiet folding and unfolding of time between my fingers and a wisp of a bear on a wire.
Lauren Henson
Photo by Jeremy Koreski.
To read the whole article, see below.
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