From Bob Giles

In 1956, my friend Alan Stickley was tending three black bear cubs as part of his Master's degree work at Virginia Tech. A single parent with triplets couldn't have had a more challenging task.

Fellow grad students were recruited to assist with feeding the bears bottled formula and weighing them.  Getting the three bears weighed was a weekly balancing act with the high-tech equipment available.

In retrospect, those were great days for us, perhaps as well for the bears. We learned of their individual curiosity and other traits, as well as about their biology. The grad students in the Price-Hall basement learned more about each other and team work than our professors might have planned.

Alan Stickley became the very successful bear biologist for the Virginia state wildlife agency...and an usher at my wedding.

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0, a technology business news and business blog venture of Handshake Media, Incorporated, a member company of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks.  The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its sponsors or advertisers.

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system.  He wrote and maintains Rural System and writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force.