00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. In this episode, we're going to dive deep into the conservation history of Mississippi's once celebrated but now controversial native species, the American black bear. We're going to start this episode off by going back and forth between two historical accounts from the same state of Mississippi, separated by nothing but time. The first being clips from local Mississippi news networks, dates ranging from ten years ago to just this past June. The second being excerpt from a book titled The Bear Hunter by James T. McCafferty, which looks into the culture of bear hunting in Mississippi from the eighteen hundreds to the early nineteen hundreds. As we flip back and forth between these two sources, I want you to pay attention to the heavy contrast between then and now. Keep in mind both are talking about the same state, but it sounds like two different worlds. We'll kick off first with recent clips from local Mississippi news networks. 00:01:28 Speaker 2: It's the biggest story on WAPT dot com justin Morgan got a traio camera photo of a black bear roaming in Mississippi. Is this first time you've found one at Sumpson County? 00:01:43 Speaker 1: I think there have been a couple farther south, but I don't recall one that far north. Excerpts from the book The Bear Hunter by James T. 00:01:51 Speaker 3: McCafferty. 00:01:52 Speaker 4: In the nineteenth century, at least among America's sportsmen, the Mississippi Delta was celebrated as a bear hunters mecca. Hunters of means and often those without, flocked to Mississippi to hunt the Delta's black bears. 00:02:05 Speaker 2: This is remarkable, all right. Action News five's Garner Montgomery joined the Sliven Studio now with an exclusive video he. 00:02:11 Speaker 4: Shot of a black bear in the Soto County gardener. 00:02:15 Speaker 5: That's right, Joe, Enjoy. This is a real treat to see the first black bear sighting into Soto County in at least ten years. 00:02:22 Speaker 4: The Delta woods were full of bears in pioneer times. One account from a man named George F. Maynard born in eighteen fifty three, states so ubiquitous was the bear in Cohoma County of his youth that when farmers failed, oaks to make room for crops, soal bears and their cubs would appear almost immediately to devour tender twigs of the fallen monarchs. It was almost impossible to make a corn crop in some parts of the county on account of the depredations of that famous animal. People would go out in the corn patch early in the morning and kill a bear before breakfast. 00:02:54 Speaker 5: Black bears are considered an endangered species and the state of Mississippi. They're mostly spotted in the southern Alta, but there have only been a handful of bear sidings here in northwest Mississippi in the past ten years. 00:03:05 Speaker 1: There were old bear hunters who never had a pound of bacon in the house. They would kill a bear and cure it like bacon, and make and save the oil by the barrel, which was fine for cooking purposes. They are tales of a famed bear hunter named Fincher Bobo, who once killed six bears in a single day. From plantation slave to English noblemen, from backwood squatter to American president, and every station in between. 00:03:28 Speaker 4: They hunted bears in the Mississippi Delta. 00:03:32 Speaker 1: Two different accounts, two different time periods, but they're speaking of the same place in the book, it sounds like they're swimming in bears, while on the news report, a black bear siding might as well fall in line with the sasquatch or ufo claim. So the question we have to answer is what happened to the black bears in Mississippi. Luckily for us, it's very well documented. Historically, black bears were abundant throughout Mississippi along with the rest to the southeast. This fact was made obvious by the quotes from the book along with several other publications. There were thousands of them just in Mississippi alone by the early nineteen hundreds. Throwback to the last episode about Miss Fanny Cook, we know how much wildlife destruction was going on then There was an estimate of less than twelve not twelve hundred twelve in the entire state. This almost complete extirpation came as a result of severe over harvest from the fur trade, market, hunting, sport hunting, illegal take, and land use changes that resulted in habitat degradation and loss. As a result of this, the state of Mississippi closed bear hunting in nineteen thirty two. Y'all may recognize this as the same year that the Game and Fish Commission was established, Protecting bears from being wiped out sat high on the priority list, along with white tailed deer and the wild turkeys. That was nineteen thirty two. Ninety three years have passed since then. Where are we at with Mississippi black bears now? I think it's time we find out. It's now June of twenty twenty five, and the sound that you're hearing is me riding in a side by side with the Mississippi Black Bear Program leader Anthony Ballard. We're in Clavern County, Mississippi, and we're headed to Dart a bear with a tranquilizer that Anthony has caught in one of his traps. Anthony believes this could be one of the biggest bears he's ever caught. I think their only option. 00:05:41 Speaker 2: I don't. 00:05:43 Speaker 4: Where's the bear? 00:05:44 Speaker 2: I mean, are we close to us? 00:05:45 Speaker 3: Yeah, we're probably one hundred and fifty yards oh ocurring that he's not. 00:05:49 Speaker 4: At the end of this stood bark, gotcha, gotcha. 00:05:52 Speaker 1: What you're hearing now is Anthony loading the dark gun and explaining to the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks intern how to chart thes. Once we get the bear sedated and out of the trap, we then set off walking down the long lane food plot that ran the top of a ridge to the bear trap situated at the end of it. The goal is for everyone to move slow and quiet. Anthony wants the bear as calm as possible for the ease of getting a tranquilizer duard into him. The trap is shaped like a cylinder imagine a large barrel laid over on its side. It has a door on one end through which Anthony put bait to lower the bear inside the trap. Anthony can monitor all of this live through the surveillance of a cellular camera. Once the bear is inside, Anthony can drop the trap door electronically. This bear had entered the trap just the night before, so by the time we got there, he had only been there for a matter of hours. You won't man heard a swing around the doorside. Yeah, okay, it carefully kind of drops off over there before before very far as we approach the trap, it's always a little unnerving. I mean, there is a wild bear there after all. The plan is for me to swing to the back end of the trap while Anthony goes to the front. If the bear is in a favorable position, Anthony will go ahead and shoot him with a tranquilizer dark. If not, he'll signal to me and I'll begin tapping on the back of the trap to make noise. Enticing the bear to move. Anthony leans over. The bear is asleep and not in a favorable darting position, so he gives me the signal, and I know it's time to make some noise. Judging off that sound, I think the bear's awake. Yep, that's an awake bear. That bear cannot be any more awake than he is right now. The problem is he's still not in a position for a good shot. So Anthony adjust and I continue to make noise to try and make the bear move around more. 00:07:52 Speaker 2: His heads. 00:07:52 Speaker 4: This way, this is a. 00:07:54 Speaker 1: Game of inches. Anthony can't just wing a dart in there and hope for the best. It has to be precise, and we need the bear to turn just a little bit more. Almost there, and there's the shot, got him. The dart is in and now we wait for it to take effect, which normally takes a few minutes. After we are sertain the bear is unconscious, we open the trap and begin to unload it. 00:08:20 Speaker 3: We're just gonna lift and pull back toward that tree, say when when. 00:08:27 Speaker 2: His head. 00:08:29 Speaker 5: Come on? 00:08:30 Speaker 3: Man, come on, man, all right. 00:08:33 Speaker 1: We found out later that this bear weighed four hundred and twelve pounds. 00:08:37 Speaker 3: All right, let's drive me. 00:08:43 Speaker 1: Four and twelve pounds. So, as you could imagine, it was no easy task getting him out of the trap. 00:08:50 Speaker 4: Alright, knock, Holy smokes, Anthony. 00:08:57 Speaker 1: The rest of the time that we had the bear sedated was somewhere around thirty minutes. In that time, we got his body weight, a hair sample for genetics, a blood sample to test for certain diseases and hormone levels, and a tooth extraction for age. This is vital information for the black bear program. When everything was collected, Anthony injected the bear with a reversal drug. We then walked up the hill where we could watch from a safe distance, and in about ten minutes or so, the bear woke up and bounded off back into the woods. To say this whole thing was a cool experience would be quite the understatement. The opportunity to get to do hands on conservation with such a cool and historic species just doesn't come around all that often, and the Mississippi black bear program is doing some really cool and important work, which I think it's time we all learned about. After this eventful bear work up with Anthony, I sat down with him for an interview so that we all can get a deeper understanding of the Mississippi black bear, the program, as well as the status, future and contra reversy surrounding this native animal. 00:10:04 Speaker 4: How long has Mississippi had a black bear program. 00:10:08 Speaker 3: The early work was done by the Museum of Natural Science. And when I say early, we're talking about you know, mid to late nineties. 00:10:15 Speaker 4: Okay, so nineties, so post Fanny Cook times. 00:10:19 Speaker 3: Yes, yes, very much so. And that's just because there weren't really that many bears in Mississippi. 00:10:24 Speaker 4: There's like twelve. 00:10:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, you had an occasional sighting here and there, you had an occasional roadkill. I mean, we've got records of mortalities all the way back to the seventies. The need for an actual program and for wildlife and Fisheries to take that over came in two thousand and two. 00:10:39 Speaker 4: And what was the reason for that. 00:10:41 Speaker 3: In the early two thousands, you had a lot more emphasis on looking at those populations, the subpopulations, particularly in Arkansas and Louisiana, you know, habitat connectivity, looking at interbreeding between different populations to kind of bolster genetic diversity. As a result of that, a lot more dispersal into Mississippi. And so there's there's some connections there of you know, that original you can say, kind of apparent, you know, population, and then those that kind of infant population moving into the delta. More and more soles that were you know, started to breed and reproducing there and then kind of grow from there. 00:11:20 Speaker 1: So the black bear program was originally formed by the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, but it was handed off to the Department of Wildlife out of necessity in two thousand and two due to a noticeable increase in bears. This can be attributed to dispersal of bears coming into Mississippi from Arkansas Louisiana, as well as slow but natural growth from the small resident population that was able to do so because of the protections they were provided. In nineteen thirty two and just a small personal request here, nobody mentioned to clear breath that Arkansas bears were helping out Mississippi bears. Okay, I mean they just talk enough trash as it is. 00:11:56 Speaker 4: Let me ask this because I want to. 00:11:58 Speaker 1: I want to clarify this early to talking about bears moving in from Arkansas and Louisiana. Like, I understand that the let's say that the population of just Mississippi, the black bear population of Mississippi. I understand that we wiped it out to really really low numbers, but we never fully wiped it out, right, that's correct, right. 00:12:17 Speaker 3: Yeah, So extinction is a species that just goes completely. 00:12:24 Speaker 2: It's gone. 00:12:24 Speaker 3: Right, everybody understands that extirpation is gone from a particular region or area of state. We were near extirpation in Mississippi. The lowest estimation was twelve bears in the state that's functionally extirpated. That's essentially none. That's wild. 00:12:40 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:12:40 Speaker 3: You know, people wonder why we don't have as many bears as places like Louisiana or Arkansas. What's for two reasons. Number One, we Arkansas and Louisiana never got quite that low in their population estimates, and they also actively brought bears from up north to bolster those populations. Mississippi never actually did so. 00:13:00 Speaker 1: Louisian in Arkansas have had bears reintroduced, Yes to some degree, Yes, they had bears reintroduced, and then they also moved bears, you know, within those two states between subpopulations to kind of even out those genetics and kind of foster those numbers and facilitate that connectivity. 00:13:17 Speaker 3: Mississippi took a more passive approach. There was one attempted restocking, I guess you could say, in nineteen thirty four. It was unsuccessful. It was a I think three pairs, so a total of six bears that were brought here for whatever reason that was not successful. So all of the bears that we have here in Mississippi are either dispersed from higher density populations in Arkansas and Louisiana or they were born here. There were never there were no bears that were actually brought here to Mississippi. 00:13:49 Speaker 1: I do think it's prudent, though I have to speculate a little bit here, but I do think that it is important that it was tried to. 00:13:57 Speaker 4: Be reintroduced in nineteen thirty four. I mean, we know because of. 00:14:02 Speaker 1: The last episode that Fanny Cook established the Game Commission in nineteen thirty two, and one of the first things they started doing there were several like restocking efforts of native game animals, animals that they wanted to make. 00:14:14 Speaker 4: Sure were kept around. 00:14:16 Speaker 1: So immediately upon the establishment of that Game Commission, they started restocking efforts of deer, They started it on turkeys, they started it on quail, and so it's important to know that they tried, and the general public that supported the establishment of that commission, which is now in DWFP. I think it's important to note that they did try to restock them all right Backwoods University enrollees. If there was going to be an exam at the end of this episode, which there's not, but if there was, one of the main takeaways would be this right here. So lean in black bears were not, I repeat, were not reintroduced to Mississippi. In the reilm of controversies surrounding this species, which we're going to dive into in more detail later, the misconception that black bears were wiped out completely and then physically brought back in and reintroduced comes up all the time, and it just isn't the case. They have always been here. But I think it is extremely important that we realized that it was attempted one time to restock them in nineteen thirty four. Here's why. Take a look at the list of animals of which restocking efforts were made. White tailed deer high community value, wild turkeys high community value, bob white quail high community value, Black bears high community value at that time. Remember what the stated reasons were for black bears almost being wiped out in the first place, fur trade, market, hunting, sport, hunting, habitat loss. Think back to quotes from the book and tales of people traveling to Mississippi just to hunt bears. I'm not sitting here claiming that black bears were this perfect species that never caused a single problem. They did as well as many other wildlife species, but they were unarguable, he sought after and valued as a game animal. 00:16:03 Speaker 3: Of that, I have no doubt. You know, we were talking earlier about the mindset of people moving through history. You know, it's really easy to play money morning quarterback and say, well, these people had the wrong idea about this, or they you know, they completely disregarded this aspect of conservation or whatever the case is. And like you said, I think it's important to kind of put yourself in that situation and maybe understand that you know, they weren't working with Google. You know, they weren't working with major universities that could do big time research. They weren't working with a huge budget, and they were doing what they could with what they had at the time. And I think the important part is they had the right idea, you know, and they may not have done everything exactly right, but it was really a paradigm shift between a mentality of kill everything, it doesn't matter, they'll replenish somehow, just live for the day and take what you want, versus hey, maybe we need to build some longevity into this and some structure and some regulations to where we can preserve the future. I think that's the biggest takeaway from that, And there's. 00:17:15 Speaker 1: A common thread in that no like talking about like you could go all the way back to the bison episode when Jeremy was explaining to me, he said, a lot of some of the follies in the market hunting with bison is they were misunderstood and people thought they were a migratory animal. So a lot of the market hunters at the time would think, Hey, we can kill every single one of these buffalo. The next herd's going to migrate through so it was like a functional misunderstanding the ecology, and that trickled down all the way to the early nineteen hundreds with so many of the game animals. The difference is that things like whitetail and turkey's got a chance to rebound, whereas black bear's. It was just a little bit of a different story, different timeline. 00:17:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think it was a different timeline for reasons may have had to do with management, but also you got to think about the reproductive potential of black bears versus something like deer a turkey. You know, if you've got a good habitat and you've got good nutrition, can that has a high caring capacity, you can make a lot of turkey or a lot of deer in a pretty short amount of time. Black bears don't breed until three to five years of age. They're only going to have two or three and the survival of those cubs are you know, fifty to seventy percent. The timeline in the pattern is just not comparable to something like white tail deer, and it's just not as fast as like you said, it's just on a different timeline. 00:18:38 Speaker 1: Anthony just gave us one of the most important pieces of information regarding the trajectory and current status of the Mississippi black bear population. We already knew that all these species were almost wiped out in the early nineteen hundreds, but what I didn't know was the different dynamics around each of their ability to rebound. Thankfully, white tailed deer and wild turkeys can reproduce relatively quickly, especially when compared to the reproductive timeline of a black bear. I mean, think about it. Many white tailed does begin reproducing at a year old, in some instances even earlier than that, and they typically breed every year, while turkey hens usually start breeding around a year old and they can usually nest every year after that. A black bear, however, does it start breeding until the age three or sometimes five, and may only have two to three cups. The timeline is vastly different, which makes for an unavoidable longer time of population recovery. This explains why, when all these species were pushed to the brink around the same time, black bears are seemingly the last in line on their way to recovery. 00:19:38 Speaker 4: What is the overall function of the black bear program? 00:19:42 Speaker 1: Has the function stayed the same from its start with the game and fish in two thousand and two to now, or has it changed a little bit, has there been stuff added to it? 00:19:51 Speaker 3: I would say it's always changing. Management is never the same, right, you know, the outcomes are different, the goals are different as different species fluctuate and there's different management needs. And it's been the same with the bear program. You know, early on it was a lot about you know, compiling as much data as we could, as many observations as we could, and really trying to just figure out what was going on right with those early populations. And then as that grew, you know, you're still looking at research, You're still looking at these those same type parameters, but you're looking at it on a larger scale because you have more and more area to look at bears in. And then eventually what's going to happen is you go from a preservationist type of approach where harvest is completely banned. You're focusing on allowing that animal to come back to healthy numbers, and eventually the day is going to come where we institute harvest again because we say, okay, you know, the federal protections of black bears were removed in twenty sixteen in Mississippi. At some day, there's going to come a day where we say the state protections are removed and we're now going to implement a hunting season. And you know, people kind of say, all right, well, you're just wanting this species to come back so that we can have a hunting season, And it's really kind of the opposite of that. You know, we're having a hunting season because the population is healthy enough now to sustain it. 00:21:12 Speaker 1: Big important key takeaway number two, y'all ready, the end goal of protecting black bears from nineteen thirty two up until now is to restore them to a sustainable population. And can any of y'all guess what is synonymous with a sustainable population, A huntable population, a hunting season, a return to allowing black bears to be used as a natural and renewable resource, a return to what they were sought after and valued for back in their earlier years of abundance. And although it is taking a significantly longer time to get there than it did several other of our game species, they are following the same trajectory as several other widely celebrated wildlife conservation wins. And when the day comes that we reached this milestone with the black Bears of Mississippi. In my opinion, it should be so librated the same. You do hear a lot of like, oh, the agency's doing this just so they can make another tag and it'll make more money, or you know, and it's you get like the kind of the sense that they're they're almost putting it like his government overreach, and you're some people kind of come right out and say, like, we should be able to do what we want kind of thing. And the reason that we don't go and just do what we want is it didn't work last week. 00:22:26 Speaker 3: We tried that. 00:22:27 Speaker 1: Yeah, like exactly, people did what they want and that's why we started. If we kept on doing what we wanted, you wouldn't have any deer to be worried. 00:22:34 Speaker 4: About, right, Like that's just the truth. Yeah. 00:22:38 Speaker 1: Would you say the main goal now of the black Bear program is to one day be able to facilitate a hunting season. Is that the main goal or is there like other priority of goals. 00:22:49 Speaker 3: I would say there's two main goals. The first main goal is to have a good solid research foundation to make management decisions, because unless you know how many bears you have. Unless you know how fast your population is growing, and you can answer those questions, you can't make informed management decisions about a hunting season. So, you know, the question always gets asked, how many bears do we have? And what people want is for me to spit out an answer we have this between this many and this many bears. What we're trying to do right now in the research that we're doing with Mississippi State University, basically they're building two different models based on the data that we've collected either here recently or historically throughout the program's history, and they're building a density estimate. So once you can identify enough individuals genetically, you can say, all right, you probably have this many individuals in this particular area. All right, So you can extrapolate and say you probably have this type of vocumency in this larger area, and eventually you get to a point where it's representative of an entire portion of the state or even the whole state. 00:23:55 Speaker 4: All right. 00:23:56 Speaker 3: The second piece of that puzzle, it's called your population projection model. What that is going to do is we take all of the historical data that we've ever had, every mortality we've had all the life spans that we know of what our immigration immigration from different states is, how many offspring that bears had, how old were they when they first had offspring. All of these different things go into that model to tell you, Okay, here's how many bears you have. Now, now what is your projected population? Based on these parameters, what might be your population two, five, ten, fifteen years from now. At that point you get basically a growth curve, right, So then you can start adding in as a factor something like harvest. Okay, if we harrest this many bears, and if we harvest this many females, this many males, how is our population going to react. That's when you can start sectioning off different parts of the state, and that's when you can start setting regulations. That's how those recommendations are come about. And so as much as I wish it was just as simple as counting bears and spending out a number, there's a lot more that goes into it that you know, we have to make that informed decision, and we're trying to make that based on the absolute most homework we can have done so that we can we can get it right. Because you know, you only get one shot at that, and you got to get it right. 00:25:18 Speaker 1: Anthony told me that the question of how many bears are there in Mississippi sits high atop the list of questions he gets commonly asked, And if you couldn't tell from his response, it's something that they are not taking lightly. There's a hefty amount of work and research going into it, and hopefully it's something that they will have a number for before the end of this year. A plan to follow up with Anthony as soon as that number is ready, so stay tuned for that. I want to ask him how we use this information and how does it play into making management decisions and setting hunting seasons. 00:25:50 Speaker 3: Most likely what happens is, you know, you'll have different bear management zones, units, whatever you'd want to call them, and then set harvest regulations on each one of them according to what your data says. 00:26:01 Speaker 4: That last bear work up you and I did, and you go in there, you dart him, you knock him out, took a tooth extraction, you took a blood sample, you took a hair sample, took a body weight, Like what do you what is all that data for? 00:26:13 Speaker 2: Like? 00:26:13 Speaker 4: What are you trying to gain from all that the hairs. 00:26:15 Speaker 3: For genetics, you can get a lot from genetics, but at the very minimum, you can identify that individual because you can say that in this particular case M. Thirty three, he was first caught as a you know, X year old in twenty twenty three, he's now a y year old in twenty twenty five, and we can say that he at least lived from twenty twenty three to twenty five. The tooth that we pull, we send that off to a lab. I send all the teeth off once a year and they do what it's called cementum annualize, so they'll take a small sliver of that, they'll stay in it, look at it under microscope, and they can count those cementum annuli rings like rings on a tree. Because you have basically a growing in a dormant stage in bears, that's pretty pronounced, and so in the model it's more valuable to say that you have a ten year old versus you have an adult. The blood sample, really it's just a catalog for me. We spend those down and freeze them, and then if we have a let's say a project that comes up in another year or two where we say, we want to look at hormone levels in certain individuals, or we want to look at this particular you know, tighter for a disease that may have been president in the population. Now we have you know, fifty samples to look through, versus starting from zero and trying to pull blood on bears as we go, gotcha, And so some of it is more for catalog purposes, and then some of it is for stuff that we're actively using. But a workup's work up, and we always usually pull those things as we go to you know, to make sure we have them, and it takes you know, an extra five or ten minutes to get that stuff, and it really does go a long way in looking at that data in the long term. 00:27:54 Speaker 1: So think about the end the field bear workup that you heard taking place towards the beginning of this episode. If you remember, I said that it yields vital information for the bear program. And now we understand why all of this data adds into the model that will help determine population size, population growth, and helps us make management decisions like determining when a hunting season can be reopened. The nuts and bolts of conservation. Pretty cool, right, somewhere in recent years there's been like a significant uptick in bears just here in Mississippi, And I don't know what to attribute that to, like more spillover from Louisiana, more spill over from Arkansas. Is that even happening or am I just like it? 00:28:40 Speaker 2: Was? 00:28:40 Speaker 4: There any truth to that? 00:28:41 Speaker 3: Well, in your population, you're going to have basically an inflection point in that growth curve, so you have you know, if you have very small numbers, you're gonna have very small growth rates, and then at a certain saturation, that curve is gonna is gonna steep, gonna get a lot steeper, and start to go up at an increasing rate. So you can start increasing at an increasing rate. So it's hard to tell exactly where we are on that growth rate, And again that's kind of why we're doing this research to see. I think it's been kind of a convergence of factors because you do have more bears on the landscape, you have more sightings, but you also have a growing public awareness of bears in Mississippi. I think a lot of that can be attributed to social media, a lot of it can be attributed to security and game cameras, just being so readily accessible. There's eyes everywhere. Everybody has a ring doorbell, everybody has cell cameras that are sending pictures all the time. There's more people that are leaving out cameras year round versus just during deer season. Usually they're on a feeder. And I think all of those things together has kind of come together and made it seem like there's just bears all over the place. When you know, it's quite possible that five different people have seen the same bear that's gone and visited five feeders. It's hard to tell how much of that is actually, you know, is real, and how much of that growth is is you know, because of the population, and how much of it is kind of artificially inflated because of the public awareness and the visibility of bears. 00:30:13 Speaker 1: From my perspective, understanding to a degree what black bears do, like how they function, their ecology, all that stuff. I think it's awesome that this native animal is being able to return to its native range here in Mississippi for a plethora of reasons. One of them like the possibility that there would be a hunting season on those again. 00:30:35 Speaker 3: That would be awesome, awesome. 00:30:36 Speaker 1: To be able to hunt a bear here. There's so much history with it. Yeah, and there are some people that feel that way. There's also a lot of people that don't feel that way. There's been a growing amount. 00:30:45 Speaker 4: Of controversy around black bears, and I want. 00:30:48 Speaker 1: To tackle some of those topics. Yeah, here's the obvious one, or one of the more obvious ones. Bears are dangerous. They're gonna eat me, They're gonna eat my kids, They're gonna. 00:30:58 Speaker 4: Eat my dog. That's it's like an on going fear that you see with bears pop up. How do you deal with that? 00:31:06 Speaker 3: It's hard to tell people not to be afraid of things. I found that it's better to educate people about the animal than it is to tell them not to be afraid of it, right, because when you really boil it all down, people fear what they don't know. And I think in a lot of people's minds, it is an animal that lives somewhere else, and then when they find out that it lives close to them, they start thinking about it in a completely different way. Now it's real. You know, you were asking about the goals of the program earlier. Research is certainly one of the big ones, and I think the other half of that coin is education, you know, because the more people that we can make understand what bears are and what they are not and just a few simple things you know, to get by with bears around, the more educated public you're going to have. And I think the more that fear level goes down. You know, I've taken people out on bear workups that were absolutely scared to death or hated bears, and then by the end of it, their mind is completely changed, or it's at least changed to a point where they appreciate what we do and the process and the animal itself versus just being this thing that they completely don't understand. 00:32:19 Speaker 1: Anthony gave us a lot of good information there, but the statement that's stuck with me the most, and the one that I can't quit thinking about, is people fear what they don't know. I also found it interesting that he's had firsthand experience taking people out on bear workups that initially had negative feelings toward bears, but after seeing the animal with their own eyes and getting some actual exposure to it, their opinions changed for the positive. I've said it before on this podcast, and I'll say it again. You can't love what you don't understand. I would encourage any of you out there that are currently on the negative side, maybe on the fence about black bears in their conservation, to give yourself a chance to learn about the animal before making a judgment on it. One of the things about Mississippi that I love is that we do have a very large and popular hunting community. Big part of that is white tail deer hunting. One of the things that you hear pop up around controversy of a growing population of black bears is the fear that they are going to basically decimate your deer herd. 00:33:29 Speaker 4: You hear that they're really bad. 00:33:30 Speaker 1: On fawns, they eat a lot of fawns. They're gonna, man, if you have bears, you're not gonna have any deer. I heard one guy say, They're like, wherever you find a bear, you ain't gonna find a deer. 00:33:40 Speaker 2: Right. 00:33:41 Speaker 4: Where do you go with all that? Is there any truth to that? 00:33:43 Speaker 3: The short answer is no. First, let's look at how many states have bear populations, something like thirty nine or forty I think most provinces in Canada. I think if that were the case, then you would have deer populations that were decimated else most of North America. We know that falls are going to get eaten by predators. Okay, that's a fact of life. There's a certain percentage every year that you can expect to get eaten by predators. Some of those predators are bobcats, coyotes, and black bears. We know that black bearries will eat them opportunistically, right, And there's studies that I've looked at from Virginia, from Michigan, from even Tensaul, Louisiana that say that essentially, yes, there's going to be predation. There's a certain percentage that are going to get eaten. So let's say somewhere between twenty and thirty percent is what you normally see survival rate. That's the ones that actually make it to let's say six months old. Okay, that's seventy odd percent of falls that are getting eaten, is going to say, relatively constant through time. 00:34:51 Speaker 4: Right, regardless of BlackBerry presents are not right due to predation. 00:34:56 Speaker 3: Now, what proportions are eaten by coyotes, bobcats, or black bears may change depending on the density of those predators on the landscape. So basically you're talking about the difference between additive or compensatory predation. All right, So basically, let's take Tensaw as an example. Let's say we had Tensaw that had was only a two predator system, so you only had coyotes and bobcats, and then the recovery of the black bear happened, and over time you have a greater and greater density of black bears. That doesn't mean you have a greater and greater proportion of white tailed deer falls that are getting predated. It means that those proportions within that percentage that are getting predated upon is changing, so that Faon would have gotten eaten now he's getting eaten by a black bear, whereas without the black bear he might have gotten even by a kyot or bobcat. I think it's pretty reductive to say that there's one particular predator that can cause these huge shifts when the data just doesn't bear that out. Has it happened locally somewhere, maybe, but on the grand scheme of thing on a landscape level, it just doesn't seem to be the case. Let's take that a step further. The Bacheler lands within the Mississippi River all right. You have these big islands and these big money camps where it's you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a share, and that's some of the most salt after deer hunting and turkey hunting in the southeast, maybe in the country. Very well managed deer herds out of this world. Genetics, great nutrition, super healthy deer herds, right, great turkey populations, abundant turkey populations. And most of those areas up and down the Misissippi River are absolutely stacked with black bears. And you know, if that were the case, and if black bears had that big of a negative population on deer or turkey, that's not what you would see in those areas. 00:36:49 Speaker 1: Is there any particular animal that on a population level suffers from the presence of black bears that we know of? 00:36:57 Speaker 3: I mean, about ninety percent of a bear's diet, you know, eighties and ninety percent is going to be a plant matter of some sort. 00:37:03 Speaker 4: Really, yeah, hear me out. 00:37:05 Speaker 1: The concern of not wanting other native game populations to suffer is a legitimate concern. However, what Anthony is telling us here is that with bears, this is not something to worry about not only does current research prove it, but think about the historical record of Mississippi from earlier prior to our own decimation of these species, Mississippi had white tailed deer, wild turkeys, bob white quail, bison, and black bears all in abundance, along with many other game and non game species. I don't know, it's almost like God designed it to be that way or something crazy, right, So in like the grand scope, like if you were to take all this stuff that people are hinging on for reasons that they don't like bears for all these different factors, or they're just some people are just scared of them. Some of these folks not all the way that they are talking about bears. It leads me to ask the question, I'm like. 00:38:02 Speaker 4: What would you like us to do? 00:38:04 Speaker 1: Are you suggesting that we exterminate them? Because like some of the folks that come up with that, it's like that's what they actually are suggesting that we exterminate the bears, and most of these are part of the hunting community. My response to that is, like, name a single time in our conservation history and our history with wildlife as a hunting community, as a sustainable hunting community, because that's what we are name a time in our history where we have elected to wipe out a native animal. 00:38:32 Speaker 3: Humans have an, I guess an intrinsic way of looking at wildlife as how they benefit from that species. Right, Yeah, So we look at whitetail deer, we hold it as a very valuable species. We look at turkey, we say they're very valuable because we hunt turkey, we consume turkey, we enjoy turkey. There's nothing wrong with that. We don't look at armadillo's with that same value. 00:38:56 Speaker 1: Right. 00:38:57 Speaker 3: So a lot of the way that we look at the inherent value of different vcs is based on kind of a self serving attitude. So I think that's part of it. And once there is an opportunity that's opened up bears as a resource, I think a lot of that's going to go away. One of the questions I get a lot of times is what good do bear do? I think what they're really saying is what do they do for me? What good are they for me? And you know, my question back to those people a lot of times is what good is a wild turkey? What does a wild turkey do biologically that we couldn't do without. Well, that's blasphemy. You can't say that, you know, but you think about it, you know. And the reason that we value them as humans so much is because they liked to hunt them and we benefit from that. They're they're pretty, and we enjoy them. And believe me, I'm not hating on turkey hunters, sure, but it's kind of that same principle, and so I look at it more of a kind of an on a historic scale, our conservation story is based on recognizing the damages that we were doing and then taking steps over the next years and decades, in centuries even to right those wrongs and to try to rebuild that in a in a responsible way that benefits the animals where we have you know, good huntable, sustainable populations, and also doesn't encroach on people, on the rights of humans. And it's a delicate balance, you know. And it's also it can be particularly delicate with bears because they do CAUs you know, damage, and and they do get into things. And you know, I'm not I'm not going to sit here and say that they don't. And no bear managers is naive enough to say that they you know, that's not an issue, but it's it's one of those things where I feel like it goes a lot back to education. And you know, once you can start building those little things in to make people's lives easier that do live around bears, and once you start building those habits in, then you can start appreciating the species on a more greater level than what do they do for for me immediately. And I mean, you know, there's there's all kinds of animals that can be nuisance. You know, you got to think about the biology of the animal. 00:41:04 Speaker 1: Right. 00:41:05 Speaker 3: Bears have a seven times better sense of smell than bloodhounds. That's quite a sniffer, right, And they're biologically wired specifically during certain times of the year to find food, to find it in abundance, and it takes a lot of food to support a three to four hundred pound animal, right. So you know, you hear about nuisance bears and problem bears and that kind of stuff, and certainly that can happen. But let's take of a deer feeder, for instance. Regardless of your feelings on deer feeders, we can agree that basically what you're doing is putting out several hundred pounds of free calories out in the middle of the woods. 00:41:46 Speaker 2: A bear is. 00:41:47 Speaker 3: Biologically wired to find large amounts of calories at one time and try to consume that, and so, yes, it's aggravating, and I sympathize with people that lose you know, cameras and four wheeler seats and that kind of stuff. But you know, bears are biologically wires to find food. They're naturally curious, they're very strong, and they're very intelligent. They're really good at getting any things. And it kind of goes back to that. The thing I tell people sometimes is, you know, it's not my job to make you like bears. It's my job to make you prepared to understand the how to live with bears. Because the more of those little things that you can build into your daily routine, talking about, you know, driving a truck instead of walking, taking a garbage can out the day of versus the night before, those little small changes in your daily life that could potentially keep a bear off your property, keep food out of a bear's mouth that would have otherwise found it. That's when you start trying to kind of win the battle of you know, living with bears and solving those problems before they occur. Ask a farmer if a deer can be a nuisance, you know, but but we value deer right right, And so it's always this balance of how do we get around those things and how do we mitigate those conflicts while also maintaining that whole balance that we're trying to maintain between wildlife and humans. Black bears, deer, turkey are all native wildlife species. They have cohabitated for longer than we've been here. And you know, it's not like it's an invasive species that are being brought in that have been brought in. They're native species, and you know, native species find a way to create an equilibrium and to survive with each other versus an invasive species that throw that balance off. 00:43:43 Speaker 1: I truly think that with time and more access to bears as a resource, a lot of the controversy around this will dissipate, and the fact of the matter is the population is growing. To wrap this up, I want to ask Anthony how he feels to be in his position at such a critical moment in this conservation story. 00:44:02 Speaker 3: From a historical perspective, it just doesn't get any cooler. Man like to be a part of the teddy Roosevelt story and the whole Collier stories and the Robert Bobos and the historical figures through time that have shaped our habitat and have shaped our history. And to be part of the North American wildlife model and the recovery of one of the most recognizable and charismatic species in the world, there's just nothing cooler than that. 00:44:38 Speaker 2: And to be. 00:44:42 Speaker 3: A part of an eventual hunting season that comes back to Mississippi for the first time since those days is man, that's just a flag on the moon moment, you know, and it's you know, it's kind of hard to be in this position without acknowledging all of those people that came, you know, the biologists that busted their behind for decades, you know, to kind of get us where we are. And we were talking about the different timelines. You know, nobody that I work with have been able to see the first hunting seasons back again on those species. I think this is the last really like one of the greatest recovery stories and conservation stories in our state's history. And man, it just does not get any cooler than that. To be part of that next chapter. 00:45:32 Speaker 1: You know, our history with our wild life and our wild lands is complicated, but it has yielded some incredible success stories through the power of conservation, and I think we have a real shot at having another success stories with the Mississippi Black Bears. And believe me, the day that that hunting season gets opened up in Mississippi, I'll be somewhere doing a victory dance. It's just too cool to not celebrate. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this country life, and I want to give a big shout out to ONEX Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like this episode, share it with your friends and family this week and stick around because there's a whole lot more on the way.