Virginia’s Black Bear
~
Saga of a Survivor
First published in the February 2005 issue of
Virginia Wildlife magazine
Hidden Walker of the Woods
Large predators survive in modern America by remaining unseen. Hiking in Shenandoah National Park or driving the dirt roads of the southeastern Piedmont can sometimes reveal the hidden presence of something big, brawny and wild—claw marks scouring a pine tree, fresh scat steaming beside a corn field, thick tufts of black hair caught in the briers of a plundered blackberry bush. The traveler who sees these signs experiences sensations grown novel in our highly developed landscape; we stop short, look about carefully, hold our breath, and listen for what’s out there.
The American black bear (Ursus americanus) is a necessarily mysterious resident of Virginia, surviving along the peripheries of our techno-industrial world. With the state’s bear population concentrated on public lands bounding the Shenandoah Valley and around the Great Dismal Swamp, our black bears seek to go about their life cycles as their ancestors have for 4.5 million years. While much of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s land is no longer habitable to bears, having been reduced to strip malls, suburbs and freeways, we remain blessed with a healthy population that—somewhat astonishingly—seems to be on a slow increase. Unlike their distant relative the grizzly bear, black bears have shown a high degree of adaptability in the presence of burgeoning human development, and it is their capacity to make the most of a changing landscape—to roll, as it were, with the punches of modern civilization—that has lately proven to be the species’ most valuable evolutionary trait.
“Black bears are amazingly adept at configuring their lives to the demands we place upon them,” says Dr. Michael Pelton, a retired professor of wildlife science, sometime consultant and one of the world’s foremost scientific authorities on the genus Ursus. “They have managed to survive and even expand their numbers in Virginia due to the increasing nut and acorn yield of our maturing forests, and to the permanent havens available to them in public parks, forests and wildlife refuges.”
As our largest remaining mammal, Virginia’s black bear is a “keystone species:” healthy populations of bears signify a vigorous ecosystem. Adult male bears (boars) are generally five to six feet long and stand two to three feet tall at the shoulder. Most boars weigh between 100 and 400 pounds, though some may weigh in excess of 500 pounds; a 740-pound boar was killed in Suffolk four years ago. Adult females (sows) generally weigh between 100 and 175 pounds and occasionally weigh more than 250 pounds.
Bears are omnivorous, like humans, with 75 percent of their diet consisting of vegetation. Versatility in diet is a hallmark of an adaptive species, and black bears consume a wide variety of foods including berries, fruits, nuts and acorns (collectively known as mast), grasses and forbs, insects and grubs, crops (especially apples, peanuts and corn), and carrion. Bears will also feed on rodents and occasionally on deer. Garbage, birdseed, pet and livestock food, vegetable gardens and fruit trees can attract bears to houses and yards.
Like all large animals, black bears often require a sizable territory in which to feed, reproduce and find cover. According to the state’s Bear Management Plan, in the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains “female home ranges vary between one and 51 square miles while male home range sizes are 10 to 293 square miles,” and studies in the South indicate that “the observed minimum areas that supported bear populations were 79,000 acres for forested wetlands and 198,000 acres for forested uplands.” While the mighty grizzly requires substantial expanses of contiguous wilderness, black bears are able to adapt to smaller forested tracts, so long as travel corridors such as stream banks with riparian buffers remain available. Thus the black bear has been able to live, and in many places thrive, near heavily populated areas along the eastern seaboard.
Depletion and Recovery
A century ago habitat destruction and overhunting had severely reduced bear numbers throughout their Southern Appalachian range. In 1974 the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) closed 66 counties to bear hunting and instituted a shorter hunting season that opened later in the year. This measure increased female survivability because sows, hibernating earlier than boars, were not as obtainable to hunters; the resulting eight percent annual decline of females killed led to increased cub production.
“Last year we had a record number of 1,510 recorded bear kills in the state, in part because of changes in the hunting season,” says Dennis Martin, Bear Project Leader for the DGIF. “Our data indicate that the state’s bear population grew at approximately six percent annually over the last decade due to population monitoring, coordinated management efforts on public lands, and increased hunter awareness of bear management objectives. Most bears are found on public lands, but private lands, particularly in the Piedmont, are seeing population increases due to the reversion of abandoned farmlands to early successional forests.”
Ironically, the ongoing tragedy of declining family farms has provided something of an opportunity for bears and other wildlife, needed compensation to offset the sprawling suburban development that is claiming so much of the rural landscape.
Bear populations grow slowly because of their limited reproductive capacity. “Bears have the lowest biotic potential of any North American mammal except for the musk ox,” says Martin. “The failure of a mast crop can have a long-term effect on bear numbers, and may reduce both the number and survival rate of cubs.” Wildlife managers like Martin worry about exotic plagues such as Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, currently devastating oak groves on the Pacific coast, and the gypsy moth, which can dramatically change forest structure and thus critical sources of mast in a very short time. Lack of natural provender increases the likelihood of “problem bear” complaints, as the omnivores turn to garbage cans, cornfields and apple orchards in search of nutrition.
Living in Bear Country
While there is not a single documented case of a bear attacking a human in Virginia, hikers in bear country need to be aware of some basic aspects of behavior. “Grizzly bears evolved on the wide-open plains and mountain drainages of the Rockies,” says Michael Pelton, “where there was nowhere to hide and any threat to themselves or their cubs had to be met with force; that’s why they are inherently aggressive. Black bears developed in dense Eastern forests, where their standard defensive reaction was to climb trees or flee through the brush.” These differing behavior traits dictate the proper response of a human feeling threatened by a bear.
“A grizzly will usually feel that his space has been invaded and perceive the person as a threat,” says Pelton. “The best thing to do with a charging adult grizzly is to assume the fetal position, protecting the head and neck, and play dead, which effectively removes the ‘threat.’ Except when a sow is defending her cubs, a black bear’s aggressive posture generally indicates that the bear considers the person to be a potential source of food—such “nuisance bears” are typically those that have been repeatedly exposed to picnic areas and garbage dumps. In these rare instances the recommended procedure is to act aggressively toward the animal, raising your arms over your head to appear larger, screaming, even throwing rocks. Running away only triggers the pursuit response, while a person playing dead might be interpreted as an easy meal.”
Common sense is your best friend in bear country, Pelton says. “Be aware of protective sows with cubs emerging in the spring, and secure food supplies when camping. Simply put, people should keep their distance from wild bears—these animals just want to be left alone, but they are powerful and often unpredictable.”
Crimes Against Bears
Much more often it is the bear that suffers at our hands, as some see wildlife merely as an opportunity for brutal exploitation. Recently in Pittsylvania County a man was arrested for luring a wild bear into a cage, dragging it behind a tractor to the man’s home, and imprisoning it for 45 days while hunting hounds were “blooded” by attacking the animal. At the same residence investigating officers found the decomposed remains of a bear with a 55-gallon barrel wedged over the animal’s skull; it was speculated that this bear, having been rendered defenseless, had been subject to similar attacks by hounds. Such infantile and sadistic behavior enrages conservation officers, the general public and honest hunters, who rightly see these infrequent but appalling instances as fertile ground for anti-hunting sentiment to build upon.
The prospect of financial gain can also lead to wildlife crime. In January 2004 the public learned of an undercover investigation of an illegal poaching ring that had been trapping and killing of bears for their paws and gall bladders, prized commodities on the black market. Evidence obtained during this investigation and previous covert efforts led undercover agents of VDGIF and the National Park Service to set up a sham outdoors store called the Dixie Emporium in Elkton, near Shenandoah National Park, where they made themselves available to sellers of bear parts and Appalachian ginseng, another natural resource vulnerable to poaching. The agents posed as middlemen for a network of buyers who were known to have shipped Virginia bear parts to North Carolina, Washington, DC, Maryland, West Virginia, New Jersey, New York, California and South Korea. With populations of the Asiatic black bear collapsing, demand for its close cousin in the U.S. has heightened and the growing Asian populations in and around the nation’s capitol have been recruited for the acquisition and overseas shipment of illicit bear parts.
After three years of intense covert activity, Operation VIPER (Virginia Interagency Effort to Protect Environmental Resources), as the Elkton undertaking was officially known, resulted in a total of 487 state violations (193 felonies and 294 misdemeanors) and 204 federal violations (99 felonies and 105 misdemeanors) against over 100 individuals. One of the chief frustrations for game wardens involved in these stings is the generally feeble outcome of local court action—the offending party gets a slap on the wrist that pales with their accumulated profiteering, and poachers come to see minimal fines or jail time as an acceptable risk given the potential reward.
But according to Colonel Herb Foster of DGIF, federal and state attorneys have lately come to see the illegal commercialization of wildlife as a serious issue and have acted decisively to set an example. “Credit for the successful prosecution of these poachers and illegal suppliers goes to U.S. Attorney John Brownlee of the Western District of Virginia and to Commonwealth Attorney Marcia Garst for Rockingham County, who together their staff members put in a great deal of time to secure needed convictions,” Foster said. “Operation VIPER was certainly a success, but the illegal trade in bear parts will unfortunately continue to be a real problem for our state’s wildlife.”
With the illegal trade in wildlife second only to drug trafficking in profitability, it is certain that poaching will continue to menace Virginia’s black bear population, particularly when the profit margin is so great: in Asia a single bear gall is worth upwards of $3,000—more than the street value of cocaine—while one serving of bear paw soup can fetch $1,000. Major Mike Bise of VDGIF was also involved in Operation VIPER and says that hunters and other wildlife proponents can help protect Virginia’s bears by keeping their eyes open for suspicious activities in the woods, such as baited tree-stands or traps. “Hunting bear over bait is illegal everywhere in Virginia,” Bise says, “as is the sale of any wildlife part, of any species, including meat, teeth and claws. Bise wants outdoorsmen to immediately report notices advertising the sale of bear parts. “Hunters, hikers, birders, anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts are the front line in protecting wildlife populations,” he said. “Sportsmen pay for wildlife protection and rehabilitation, and VDGIF depends upon them to act as our eyes and ears in the woods. When poachers steal the public’s wildlife, nobody wins but the poachers.”
Prince of the Appalachian Forest
The American black bear is a fascinating and iconic animal, a symbol of wilderness somehow able to survive in the remnants of undeveloped forest we have wisely saved from destruction. Largely confined to public lands and wholly dependent upon our protection from poachers and habitat destruction, Virginia’s bear population is nonetheless showing signs of a healthy comeback after decades of fading away. Like an emissary from a greener, wilder America, the black bear speaks to us of a time when the country was still young.
Large predators survive in modern America by remaining unseen. Hiking in Shenandoah National Park or driving the dirt roads of the southeastern Piedmont can sometimes reveal the hidden presence of something big, brawny and wild—claw marks scouring a pine tree, fresh scat steaming beside a corn field, thick tufts of black hair caught in the briers of a plundered blackberry bush. The traveler who sees these signs experiences sensations grown novel in our highly developed landscape; we stop short, look about carefully, hold our breath, and listen for what’s out there.
The American black bear (Ursus americanus) is a necessarily mysterious resident of Virginia, surviving along the peripheries of our techno-industrial world. With the state’s bear population concentrated on public lands bounding the Shenandoah Valley and around the Great Dismal Swamp, our black bears seek to go about their life cycles as their ancestors have for 4.5 million years. While much of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s land is no longer habitable to bears, having been reduced to strip malls, suburbs and freeways, we remain blessed with a healthy population that—somewhat astonishingly—seems to be on a slow increase. Unlike their distant relative the grizzly bear, black bears have shown a high degree of adaptability in the presence of burgeoning human development, and it is their capacity to make the most of a changing landscape—to roll, as it were, with the punches of modern civilization—that has lately proven to be the species’ most valuable evolutionary trait.
“Black bears are amazingly adept at configuring their lives to the demands we place upon them,” says Dr. Michael Pelton, a retired professor of wildlife science, sometime consultant and one of the world’s foremost scientific authorities on the genus Ursus. “They have managed to survive and even expand their numbers in Virginia due to the increasing nut and acorn yield of our maturing forests, and to the permanent havens available to them in public parks, forests and wildlife refuges.”
As our largest remaining mammal, Virginia’s black bear is a “keystone species:” healthy populations of bears signify a vigorous ecosystem. Adult male bears (boars) are generally five to six feet long and stand two to three feet tall at the shoulder. Most boars weigh between 100 and 400 pounds, though some may weigh in excess of 500 pounds; a 740-pound boar was killed in Suffolk four years ago. Adult females (sows) generally weigh between 100 and 175 pounds and occasionally weigh more than 250 pounds.
Bears are omnivorous, like humans, with 75 percent of their diet consisting of vegetation. Versatility in diet is a hallmark of an adaptive species, and black bears consume a wide variety of foods including berries, fruits, nuts and acorns (collectively known as mast), grasses and forbs, insects and grubs, crops (especially apples, peanuts and corn), and carrion. Bears will also feed on rodents and occasionally on deer. Garbage, birdseed, pet and livestock food, vegetable gardens and fruit trees can attract bears to houses and yards.
Like all large animals, black bears often require a sizable territory in which to feed, reproduce and find cover. According to the state’s Bear Management Plan, in the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains “female home ranges vary between one and 51 square miles while male home range sizes are 10 to 293 square miles,” and studies in the South indicate that “the observed minimum areas that supported bear populations were 79,000 acres for forested wetlands and 198,000 acres for forested uplands.” While the mighty grizzly requires substantial expanses of contiguous wilderness, black bears are able to adapt to smaller forested tracts, so long as travel corridors such as stream banks with riparian buffers remain available. Thus the black bear has been able to live, and in many places thrive, near heavily populated areas along the eastern seaboard.
Depletion and Recovery
A century ago habitat destruction and overhunting had severely reduced bear numbers throughout their Southern Appalachian range. In 1974 the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF) closed 66 counties to bear hunting and instituted a shorter hunting season that opened later in the year. This measure increased female survivability because sows, hibernating earlier than boars, were not as obtainable to hunters; the resulting eight percent annual decline of females killed led to increased cub production.
“Last year we had a record number of 1,510 recorded bear kills in the state, in part because of changes in the hunting season,” says Dennis Martin, Bear Project Leader for the DGIF. “Our data indicate that the state’s bear population grew at approximately six percent annually over the last decade due to population monitoring, coordinated management efforts on public lands, and increased hunter awareness of bear management objectives. Most bears are found on public lands, but private lands, particularly in the Piedmont, are seeing population increases due to the reversion of abandoned farmlands to early successional forests.”
Ironically, the ongoing tragedy of declining family farms has provided something of an opportunity for bears and other wildlife, needed compensation to offset the sprawling suburban development that is claiming so much of the rural landscape.
Bear populations grow slowly because of their limited reproductive capacity. “Bears have the lowest biotic potential of any North American mammal except for the musk ox,” says Martin. “The failure of a mast crop can have a long-term effect on bear numbers, and may reduce both the number and survival rate of cubs.” Wildlife managers like Martin worry about exotic plagues such as Sudden Oak Death Syndrome, currently devastating oak groves on the Pacific coast, and the gypsy moth, which can dramatically change forest structure and thus critical sources of mast in a very short time. Lack of natural provender increases the likelihood of “problem bear” complaints, as the omnivores turn to garbage cans, cornfields and apple orchards in search of nutrition.
Living in Bear Country
While there is not a single documented case of a bear attacking a human in Virginia, hikers in bear country need to be aware of some basic aspects of behavior. “Grizzly bears evolved on the wide-open plains and mountain drainages of the Rockies,” says Michael Pelton, “where there was nowhere to hide and any threat to themselves or their cubs had to be met with force; that’s why they are inherently aggressive. Black bears developed in dense Eastern forests, where their standard defensive reaction was to climb trees or flee through the brush.” These differing behavior traits dictate the proper response of a human feeling threatened by a bear.
“A grizzly will usually feel that his space has been invaded and perceive the person as a threat,” says Pelton. “The best thing to do with a charging adult grizzly is to assume the fetal position, protecting the head and neck, and play dead, which effectively removes the ‘threat.’ Except when a sow is defending her cubs, a black bear’s aggressive posture generally indicates that the bear considers the person to be a potential source of food—such “nuisance bears” are typically those that have been repeatedly exposed to picnic areas and garbage dumps. In these rare instances the recommended procedure is to act aggressively toward the animal, raising your arms over your head to appear larger, screaming, even throwing rocks. Running away only triggers the pursuit response, while a person playing dead might be interpreted as an easy meal.”
Common sense is your best friend in bear country, Pelton says. “Be aware of protective sows with cubs emerging in the spring, and secure food supplies when camping. Simply put, people should keep their distance from wild bears—these animals just want to be left alone, but they are powerful and often unpredictable.”
Crimes Against Bears
Much more often it is the bear that suffers at our hands, as some see wildlife merely as an opportunity for brutal exploitation. Recently in Pittsylvania County a man was arrested for luring a wild bear into a cage, dragging it behind a tractor to the man’s home, and imprisoning it for 45 days while hunting hounds were “blooded” by attacking the animal. At the same residence investigating officers found the decomposed remains of a bear with a 55-gallon barrel wedged over the animal’s skull; it was speculated that this bear, having been rendered defenseless, had been subject to similar attacks by hounds. Such infantile and sadistic behavior enrages conservation officers, the general public and honest hunters, who rightly see these infrequent but appalling instances as fertile ground for anti-hunting sentiment to build upon.
The prospect of financial gain can also lead to wildlife crime. In January 2004 the public learned of an undercover investigation of an illegal poaching ring that had been trapping and killing of bears for their paws and gall bladders, prized commodities on the black market. Evidence obtained during this investigation and previous covert efforts led undercover agents of VDGIF and the National Park Service to set up a sham outdoors store called the Dixie Emporium in Elkton, near Shenandoah National Park, where they made themselves available to sellers of bear parts and Appalachian ginseng, another natural resource vulnerable to poaching. The agents posed as middlemen for a network of buyers who were known to have shipped Virginia bear parts to North Carolina, Washington, DC, Maryland, West Virginia, New Jersey, New York, California and South Korea. With populations of the Asiatic black bear collapsing, demand for its close cousin in the U.S. has heightened and the growing Asian populations in and around the nation’s capitol have been recruited for the acquisition and overseas shipment of illicit bear parts.
After three years of intense covert activity, Operation VIPER (Virginia Interagency Effort to Protect Environmental Resources), as the Elkton undertaking was officially known, resulted in a total of 487 state violations (193 felonies and 294 misdemeanors) and 204 federal violations (99 felonies and 105 misdemeanors) against over 100 individuals. One of the chief frustrations for game wardens involved in these stings is the generally feeble outcome of local court action—the offending party gets a slap on the wrist that pales with their accumulated profiteering, and poachers come to see minimal fines or jail time as an acceptable risk given the potential reward.
But according to Colonel Herb Foster of DGIF, federal and state attorneys have lately come to see the illegal commercialization of wildlife as a serious issue and have acted decisively to set an example. “Credit for the successful prosecution of these poachers and illegal suppliers goes to U.S. Attorney John Brownlee of the Western District of Virginia and to Commonwealth Attorney Marcia Garst for Rockingham County, who together their staff members put in a great deal of time to secure needed convictions,” Foster said. “Operation VIPER was certainly a success, but the illegal trade in bear parts will unfortunately continue to be a real problem for our state’s wildlife.”
With the illegal trade in wildlife second only to drug trafficking in profitability, it is certain that poaching will continue to menace Virginia’s black bear population, particularly when the profit margin is so great: in Asia a single bear gall is worth upwards of $3,000—more than the street value of cocaine—while one serving of bear paw soup can fetch $1,000. Major Mike Bise of VDGIF was also involved in Operation VIPER and says that hunters and other wildlife proponents can help protect Virginia’s bears by keeping their eyes open for suspicious activities in the woods, such as baited tree-stands or traps. “Hunting bear over bait is illegal everywhere in Virginia,” Bise says, “as is the sale of any wildlife part, of any species, including meat, teeth and claws. Bise wants outdoorsmen to immediately report notices advertising the sale of bear parts. “Hunters, hikers, birders, anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts are the front line in protecting wildlife populations,” he said. “Sportsmen pay for wildlife protection and rehabilitation, and VDGIF depends upon them to act as our eyes and ears in the woods. When poachers steal the public’s wildlife, nobody wins but the poachers.”
Prince of the Appalachian Forest
The American black bear is a fascinating and iconic animal, a symbol of wilderness somehow able to survive in the remnants of undeveloped forest we have wisely saved from destruction. Largely confined to public lands and wholly dependent upon our protection from poachers and habitat destruction, Virginia’s bear population is nonetheless showing signs of a healthy comeback after decades of fading away. Like an emissary from a greener, wilder America, the black bear speaks to us of a time when the country was still young.
