nieworld.com

Teachers

Students

Families

Projects

Email NIE

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Grad student tracks nuisance bears

By DINAH VOYLES PULVER
NEWS-JOURNAL ENVIRONMENT WRITER

DEBARY — For months a black bear feasted from pickins in garbage cans on Rosedown Boulevard.

State wildlife officials sent out fliers and asked residents to keep their trash inside until just before garbage trucks arrived. But then the wily bruin started showing up at 6 a.m. instead, still strewing garbage all over before the trucks arrived, neighborhood resident Mia Lee said.

But it may have been yummier food than garbage attracting this bear. Neighbors say someone on the street had started feeding the black bear and nicknamed him “Rusty.”

That happens all too often, say experts with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. And bad human behavior, such as illegal feeding or leaving garbage out, trains a bear to look for food in suburbia rather than the woods. Then the bear winds up getting labeled a nuisance, which earns it a quick capture and a free ticket to exile in a remote area of the Ocala National Forest.

What happened after that was unknown until Kim Annis, a grad student in the University of Florida’s Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, talked the commission into paying for a study.

Most people can only guess what these bears do in the woods. Annis knows. For a year and a half, she has fixed tracking collars on captured nuisance bears before they are released.

She has collared 35, more than she had expected. Now she rides around via truck or airplane, tracking dozens of signals from the collars.

She’s looking for trends. Does one bear gender get into trouble more than another? Are they older or younger, bigger or smaller, breeding or not?

So far, she said, it seems older bears walk farther and female bears will breed and give birth to cubs after being moved. Nearly half get into trouble again.

Her work is important because it will help the commission measure the success of its nuisance bear program, said Walt McKown, a bear biologist with the commission’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute.

“We don’t know if the bears go and sin no more or if they continue being a problem or what happens,” McKown said. “This will let us know what happens and if it’s good for them and if it’s a good policy.”

It was a last resort when the wildlife commission sent a licensed trapper to Rosedown earlier this month.

The trap was set in Lee’s yard. Stocked with doughnuts, it worked “very nicely,” she said. “About 2 1/2 hours later, we had ourselves a bear.”

That’s when “Rusty” met Annis. After the bear was tranquilized, she fitted him with an expandable collar that fits bears weighing 60 to 700 pounds. His weight, health and size were checked, then he was released into the forest.

There, he has stayed pretty close to where he was dropped off, she said. After about a week, he found a bear hole, a flat pond in the scrubby woods of the forest where male bears like to hang around for their dormant winter season.

The bears begin to roam in the spring, Annis said, either looking for a new home range or companionship. They may roam great distances during breeding season, she said.

Once some bears start walking, they just keep going. One bear took a more ambitious “grand explore” than Winnie the Pooh ever considered. By the time the bear returned to the Ocala forest several months later, he’d traveled more than 150 miles, she said. He first headed north to Keystone Heights and then west to Waldo, Gainesville, Archer and then Chiefland before finding his way back to the forest.

Another bear was released in the central part of the forest in June and then traveled to Lady Lake, Mount Dora, Eustis and Altoona. Just this month, that bear got into trouble when commission officials say it was illegally shot and killed in someone’s yard.

Other bears made a beeline for home where they were caught, Annis said, including five of 11 at one point in the study.

A number of bears continued to make nuisances of themselves.

One bear was recaptured and taken to an even more remote location in the Apalachicola National Forest in the Panhandle. Another, which had broken into a screened porch in South Florida, broke into a home in the forest. He had to be euthanized.

But there have been bright moments in Annis’ research, including the opportunity to snuggle, if only briefly, with a bear cub while its mother is still too sluggish from her winter dormant period to defend her cubs very vigorously.

The researchers will creep in on a collared female if she has been still long enough for them to suspect she has produced cubs. If they find cubs, they’ll go back weeks later — just before the cubs are able to walk. They chase mom off, check the cubs over and return them to her. By that time, Annis said, she has invested so much energy into her cubs that the likelihood of abandonment is very small.

Annis has been pleasantly surprised that none of her bears have been killed by a car, even with all the walking some have done. Vehicle collisions have become a leading cause of bear deaths statewide in recent years.

“The only thing I can attach to that, and it’s pure speculation on my part, is that these captured bears in many cases have been around people, vehicles and neighborhoods,” she said. “They may be a little more vehicle-savvy than bears that live in the middle of the forest and only see cars when they try to cross State Road 40.”

Did You Know?

There are eight species of bears, ranging in size from 100 to 1,600 pounds. Three live in North America: black, brown (also called grizzly), and polar.

*Pandas are the most rare.

*Spectacled bears are the only bears in South America.

*Sun bears, also called honey bears, live in Asia and are the smallest bear species.

*Sloth bears are found in Southeast Asia.

*The Asiatic black bear’s scientific name, Selenarctos thibetanus, means “moon bear of Tibet” because of the large, white crescent-shaped mark on its chest.

*Koalas are marsupials, not bears.

Compiled by environment writer Dinah Voyles Pulver.

Copyright © 2010 NIE WORLD (www.nieworld.com). All content copyrighted and may not be republished without permission. The News-Journal has no control over and is not responsible for content on other Web sites. Privacy Policy.