Bears bouncing back
Big Bend National Park on alert as black bear sightings increase along with number of visitors.
On a BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK — cool November day in the lap of the Chisos Mountains, National Park Service wildlife biologist Raymond Skiles, tall, thin, uniformed, is on the lookout for unsealed coolers, loose food scraps, even troughs of water: anything, in other words, that could lure one of the increasing number of black bears out of their ocotillo-studded habitat to engage humans on the park’s asphalt parking lots or huddled campgrounds.
Driving along the park’s central campsites and trail heads, Skiles calls to mind the fretful Chief Martin Brody, the police chief of Amity Island played by Roy Scheider in “Jaws.” Skiles might have something to worry about: Bear sightings are up, and some of the favorite trails and campsites at this national park — visited more by people from Austin than from any other place — are closed.
The park service estimates 30 to 40 black bears occupy this 20-square-mile “sky island” — so known because the mountain landscape is markedly different from the Chihuahuan Desert that surrounds it. Nutand berry-bearing trees form what Skiles calls a “mosaic of quality bear habitat.”
The reinvigoration of the bear population here — hunted out by 19th-century pioneers, the bears were gone when the national park was established in 1944 — comes just as Big Bend National Park sees its highest number of visitors ever.
No humans have been attacked in the national park by bears, and no bear has been forcibly removed from the heart of the national park for several years, but Skiles and other rangers are not taking chances. They convene weekly formal meetings to share bear reconnaissance; they mount motion-detection cameras to capture their comings and goings; they dispatch patrols to track their presence; they even scrutinize scat along trails to see how fresh it might be.
Reaching 6 feet tall and weighing up to 300 pounds, black bears — Ursus americanus — are native to all of Texas, but hunting and trapping erased them from the landscape.
East Texas lawmaker Lewis Hightower, known as the “Bear-Hunting Judge,” was famed for hunting proclivities: Known to dismiss court to make time for hunts, he is credited with having killed some 200 bears during his lifetime.
“I practice law for recreation and hunt bear for a livin’,” Hightower once said.
For much of the 20th century, virtually the only Texas black bears one could find were of the taxidermied variety; what remained of their descendants had retreated to northern Mexico.
But Texas made it illegal to hunt bears in 1983, and black bears began re-establishing themselves in this remote corner of West Texas. In 1988, a visitor photographed a mother and three cubs in the Chisos, and suddenly, Big Bend National Park joined the ranks of parks that had a bear population.
Garbage cans armed only with standard lids were replaced with bear-proof trash receptacles; the park’s landfill was fenced off and electrified; screened-in lodgings were fortified with galvanized fencing.
“Other national parks — Yosemite, Yellowstone, Sequoia — had long had bear experience, including people dumping food out for bears,” said Skiles, who has worked at Big Bend since 1979. “Big Bend did not want to make those mistakes. We decided to bear-proof the place rather than claw our way out from a bad start.”
The tactics are meant more for the bears’ protection than humans’ protection. There’s an adage at national parks that a fed bear is a dead bear, and park officials are trying to do what they can to make the human environment unappetizing for bears.
‘Generally harmless’
Black bears are omnivorous but are not known to seek out human flesh.
“Black bears are not as dangerous as some people think,” says a guide to the species by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
While “generally harmless,” they “can injure humans when provoked and should be treated with caution,” the guide says.
In 2008, a black bear destroyed three unoccupied tents at a high mountain backcountry campsite; apparently the bear was trying to get at shoes left in the tents.
“Shoes and boots might be best left outside of tents so that if a bear is curious about that particular odor, they can smell the shoe, satisfy their curiosity, and move on,” an advisory from the National Park Service announced.
Rangers tell park visitors not to run if they see a bear, but to back away to get out of range.
“If you feel threatened by a bear or lion, hold your ground, wave your arms, throw stones, and shout; never run,” says a Big Bend safety guide.
(Brown bears, whose North American habitat ranges from Wyoming north to Canada, can be much more aggressive.)
The Big Bend black bears eat an enormous number of piñon nuts and madrone berries, plucked from trees or picked up from the ground, to get their calories.
End of drought
The drought of 2011-12 left just 15 to 20 bears in Big Bend.
“Emaciated cubs were barely able to lift their heads,” Skiles said.
But the rains have replenished the bears’ food stock — these are about as many bears as biologists believe the Chisos have supported. Long-term risks await: Scientists say this region might grow drier, further shrinking the bears’ habitat.
Today, though, more immediate concerns occupy the park service. The popular Lost Mine Trail has been closed nearly a month, and some Chisos backcountry campsites are off limits; officials will wait until at least three consecutive days without a bear sighting by patrolling rangers before they reopen the trail.
And Raymond Skiles sets off on another trail, determined to check out reports of bear sightings in another part of the Chisos Basin.