A behavioural feature, maybe little known, is that senior adults do not eat together. The breeding pair, Boldy's mum and dad, are an exception to this rule. Besides eating together, the parents can show explicit signs of affection:
In this clip of mid-May 2021, the Mother is seen eating at the bait-site. She hears someone coming and is frightened, but then she sees it is her partner. She goes up to him and touches him with her nose on the lower chin. In a graphic outline it looks like this:
Credit: Dr. Latinka Hristova, NMNHS
The nose-touch – the ‘kiss’ – is often seen as a sign of care and affection between other members of the family. In the clip below, this is shown by a two-year old male, towards his younger siblings. He takes a piece from the food pile and goes up to the younger ones, who are waiting obediently at a safe distance. He gives one of them a nose kiss while simultaneously dropping the food piece before them.
We named the older sibling Round Ears after the adorable shape of his ears. Round Ears surrounds the younglings with layers of care and affection from coming out in the open on his own, to bringing them dinner and giving nose kisses. The junior adults are then seen to be eating together from already dropped pieces of food. Towards the end of the video, Round Ears goes up to the second of the younger ones and they are seen to touch cheeks:
The Cheek Touch
When the new cubs begin to be seen around the bait-site after mid-July, it is the third senior adult or ‘the Uncle’ as my father calls him, who is the principal chaperone. His behaviour towards the young ones can be stern at times, but affection is also often shown. In the clip below he is chaperoning the newborn cubs. At the time of recording (20 August), they are already three months old. As proper bait-site behaviour requires, while the Uncle is having his dinner, the cubs are hovering around the ‘dish’. At one point, the Uncle goes up to them and touches nose with the nearest:
The moment is captured in a screenshot from the clip:
And finally we want to apologise for the poor quality of some of the images posted. We are aiming to upgrade our cameras for the new research season 2025 and the coming of the new pups. The trail camera we're looking at is Spypoint FORCE-PRO Trail Camera
£209.00. If you want to help us please click here: https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/98Yp7VoLNH.
I will be posting regular updates on the progress of this project and all preparations for the coming spring.
