By Jessica Domel
Multimedia Reporter

The Borderlands Research Institute (BRI) at Sul Ross State University is working with landowners and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) to study black bears in far West Texas in hopes of learning more about their ecology and mitigating bear-human conflicts.

Due to population declines in the 1940s and ’50s, black bears are rare in Texas, but experts say they are slowly returning to the Lone Star State.

“It all started quite a number of years ago. Back in the 1990s, people were noticing black bears were starting to come into Big Bend once again. From there, the bears have been slowly being noticed outside the park farther and farther from the Mexican border,” Amanda Veals Dutt, post-doctoral research specialist at BRI, said. “The impetus of our project is to understand where they’re coming from, where they’re going, what they’re doing and how we can protect the habitat and resources for them as they recolonize Texas, so we can make sure we have a healthy bear population well into the future.”

To learn more about the bears, TPWD and BRI staff worked with landowners to capture and fit nine black bears—mostly young males—with radio collars that have GPS capability.

“It’s pretty real-time in the sense that we can get an understanding of where a bear is about six hours after a location is taken from their collar, sent to a satellite and then sent to us,” Veals Dutt said. “We’re able to understand what they’re doing as they come back into Texas, why they might be there and what they’re eating.”

The team hopes to capture and collar 20 additional bears.

“We really hope to capture more of the behavior and interactions with people as more and more bears come into this area, so we can have a richer sense of what’s going on on the landscape to better inform Texas Parks and Wildlife and landowners on how to coexist, because really, the bears are just coming into these areas,” Veals Dutt told the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network. “If we can get on top of these conflicts now, when there are more bears, hopefully these strategies will be well implemented.”

A key component of the project is engaging with landowners, hunters and communities on the results of the research and preventing negative human-bear interactions.

“We actually had a problem bear already,” Veals Dutt said. “One of our collared bears got into dumpsters at a restaurant in the Terlingua area. We worked with Texas Parks and Wildlife to capture that bear and then relocate him to Black Gap Wildlife Management area—public land that’s not terribly far away, but far enough away that we felt he wouldn’t be in the midst of conflict anymore.”

The interaction proved that re-location is not an effective tool for dealing with increasing black bear populations.

“In about a week’s time, he moved the 30 miles back and settled right back into where he had been,” Veals Dutt said. “These animals are capable of really large movements, so that won’t be a very effective path forward. What we hope is the effective path forward is actually on-the-ground mitigation with landowners.“

TPWD has been working with business and landowners in the Terlingua area to obtain bear-proof dumpsters to reduce the temptation for bears to come into the community.

“While we’re waiting for those dumpsters to come in, we’ve actually been working on temporary strategies,” Veals Dutt said. “That involves slightly electrifying current dumpsters so they keep bears out of them. Essentially, if your dumpster doesn’t have all metal, bears are very strong and can get into that. Until an all metal dumpster can be provided for the community, we provide light electrical fencing around the dumpsters. Basically, this keeps the bears out of that while still providing access to the dumpsters for the people that need to use them.”

TPWD is also working with landowners to test different electrical fencing solutions for deer feeders.

“Bears don’t know that the corn is just for deer, so they like to pull open the bottoms and just eat their fill,” Veals Dutt. “To make sure they don’t have damaged feeders that can cost potentially hundreds of dollars and/or they’re not losing money in having to more frequently replace feed, TPWD has been working to electrify that area so deer can hop over and still get access, but bears aren’t able to do that.”

The strategy has been effective thus far.

“There’s been some great video evidence of a bear coming up, sniffing, getting a light shock on the nose, and then saying, ‘Oh no, thank you. I’m not coming back to this again,’” Veals Dutt said. “It’s not enough to seriously injure them, but enough to startle them and tell them this is not a place they can find food.”

TPWD held several meetings in the area in January to discuss living with black bears in West Texas. BRI researchers were on hand to discuss the black bear project and preliminary findings that may help landowners who are dealing with black bears. Future public outreach is also planned.

“One of our major goals is to conduct outreach and education for all Texans—school-aged children and also the adults who are the ones that have to actually live with dealing with these bears on their property. We’re wanting to provide the knowledge of what we found out from our side of things scientifically, but then also share how we’re working with Texas Parks and Wildlife and how landowners can work with Texas Parks and Wildlife to safely and hopefully, more easily, coexist with bears in the future.”

Although they may be considered a nuisance to some, Veals Dutt said black bears play an important role.

“Their presence alone can regulate the behavior of those smaller carnivores like coyotes that can also be considered nuisance animals by some people,” Veals Dutt said. “Because they’re very generalist in their diet, they eat quite a lot of nuts, fruits and berries. When they consume those food items, they then disperse the seeds once they pass through their system. So, when they come back into the ecosystem, it’s naturally going to be more diverse and more healthy, and that is only going to benefit all of the species that we all care about. It’s going to benefit the people that live on the land that want to enjoy wildlife.”

Black bears are a state threatened species and are protected by law.

“There is no hunting or trapping allowed in the state of Texas. That also means that if there is conflict, the person needs to go to Texas Parks and Wildlife and report that conflict so that they can help deal with that problem bear in whatever method they deem appropriate for that specific situation,” Veals Dutt said.

It is against the law to hunt, harass or kill black bears in Texas.

It is unknown how many bears currently live in Texas. That’s something the BRI hopes to learn through their research.

Landowners who are interested in working with BRI on the black bear study may email bri@sulross.edu.