Black Bear Captures!!

I can proudly say that I now have a real life bear component to my thesis project! Looking back it doesn't seem like it took me all that long to catch a bear (9 trapping nights to be exact), but at the time it seemed to take forever!  Still, after catching a couple foxes, having my bait stolen and my traps rolled, I still got 'em!  I learned a lot about bears and how to trap them during that time.  The bears definitely outsmarted me way before I was able to outsmart them... but they had to make a mistake sooner or later!

Trapping bears down here in the desert is a much different experience than the one I had in PA trapping bears with the Game Commission.  For one thing, I wasn't able to use the sweet smelling Krispy Kreme donuts that we used in PA.  No, first I used good and ripe - almost rotting fruits - to try and get their attention.  But because it's so dry down here the bait would dry up almost immediately and be useless.  So then I opted for the stronger smell of sardines to try and entice them.  That was a success, and how I caught the first bear!!  But I had been getting pictures of a rather large bear on my trail cameras and soon realized he was not going to go in the barrel traps that I was using.  So after 2 flat tires and a lot of running back and forth, we finally got the culvert trap out to where the bears were.  The only problem with using the culvert trap was that I was going to need a much larger (and smellier) bait to attract the bears.

The first night I used dog food and a lot of sardines, but had nothing in the morning... Luckily (well we thought it was) the next morning there was a fresh roadkill javelina on the road.  So... to spare you the gory and smelly details... we had a much bigger (and smellier!) bait available to put in the culvert trap.  Unfortunately, again I still didn't get the bear - but he had rolled a couple of the other barrel traps that also had parts from the javelina as bait... so we knew he was interested!  (Quick explanation - since the barrel traps have a door that closes from the top, like a guillotine, this bear would roll the trap on it's side so that the door would stay open.  Still, I realized he wasn't going in the trap to steal the bait.  He was obviously leery of going into such a small place - hence bringing out the big culvert.)  We found a way to keep the traps open during the day with no risk of the doors closing, hoping that would cause the bears to get used to going into the traps and realizing they could get food out of the deal.  So after we hung the javelina bait with no luck that night, the bear came during the day and stole it while the trap was chained open.  Although it was frustrating that the bait was gone (meaning I had to go cruise the roads for more - less fortunate - wildlife), it was a good thing because now I knew that he would go in there expecting a meal.  Unfortunately I couldn't find another big bait to hang in there, but found something smaller that apparently wasn't interesting enough because I still didn't get him the next morning.  Again, to save you all the details, the next day I found another roadkill - a deer this time - and hung that up in the trap that evening when I set the traps.  Sure enough the next morning I caught the bear that thought he was so clever rolling the traps and stealing the bait!!

Well, that was a lot of background info that most of you probably skimmed through or skipped over, so I'll just get to the good parts - pictures!

We named the first bear BooBoo... I'll explain the name later :)

Here is what a barrel trap looks like.  The one thing I was most worried about with trapping bears down here was making sure we kept them cool.  It gets hot really quickly here and those traps can heat up fast in direct sunlight.  Shade was limited, so we made sure we had plenty of water and ice to keep the bear cool.  Luckily, there was some cloud cover this day (rare in the desert!), and it even rained later in the afternoon (even more rare after about 8 months of no rain!) which couldn't have been more perfect!  Once we had the bear out of the trap we checked his temperature about every 10 minutes to make sure he wasn't over heating.  This bear didn't even get close to over heating which made me much more relaxed while working on him!

This is a picture of me loading up the drug in the jabstick.  Basically the jabstick has a syringe with a needle at the end and you "jab" it into the bear to administer the drug.

After administering the drug, we had to wait around for it to do it's job.  It was really dark in the trap... even a flashlight didn't help!  We soon realized he wasn't going down - so either I didn't get the drug in when I jabbed him, or we underestimated his weight and didn't give him enough.  To make a long story short, it was both.  We're pretty sure the drug came out the bottom of the syringe the first couple of times I tried jabbing him, and we were off on his weight by about 20 lbs or so.  So, because of that we ended up giving him drug SIX times, and it took him 2 hours to be sedated enough for us to work on him! Poor guy!!  That's why we named him BooBoo.  It's not something I like to admit... but it's the truth.

Once we finally had him out of the trap there were lots of measurements we had to take.  We also put a PIT tag in him which has a unique ID number that will help us determine who he is if we (or anyone else) catches him in the future without a collar on.  We check his overall health by looking at his teeth and claws and checking him for ectoparasites or wounds.  This bear was in really good shape considering his environment.  I was really surprised by how good he looked! (We'll take all this information down on every bear we catch - as well as the info listed under the next picture)

We also took some biological samples: hair, tissue, and blood.  In this picture I am trying to draw blood from a vein in his hind leg.  Now I've taken blood from bears before - at a bear check station where they are already dead and can't be hurt... So I was a little nervous about doing this for the first time on a live bear.  Whether it was my nerves or lack of skill, I could not get any blood! After poking him a couple times I figured I had stuck a needle in him enough times for the day and gave up.  My advisor, Dr. Moody-Harveson, helped me out and got some herself.  I guess that's something I'll have to work on! (Actually when I drew blood from the second bear I got it on the first try!!)

Here is a picture of what the collar looks like.  It's so bulky!!  Bears are really good at taking collars off so we needed to make sure it was snug enough that he wouldn't be able to get it off, but because bears put on weight in the fall we also needed to make sure there was room enough for him to grow a little.  These collars have a remote drop off system.  So if I ever get pictures of BooBoo on my trail cameras or see him in person and notice that the collar is too tight or there is something else wrong with it, we can have it removed without having to capture him again.  Another great thing about these is that they are satellite GPS collars.  That means that through satellites we get this bear's locations sent to us automatically in an email and we can import the data into ArcGIS or GoogleEarth to see the locations on a map!  Isn't that so cool??  Even though the collars are expensive (about $3500 each), in the long run it saves a lot of time and money compared to regular radio collars.  If we were to just use radio collars we'd probably need to hire a helicopter crew to fly with the telemetry equipment in order to get better fixes on the bears.  Using the satellite GPS collars is a much more accurate method of tracking their movements.  And we can get 4 locations per day instead of going out every once in a while to look for them if they had regular radio collars.

Here is another picture of the collar we put on BooBoo.  Ron put some padding on the inside of this one and wrapped it with some electrical tape.  The tape and padding will eventually wear off and allow more room for BooBoo's growth this fall.  Since he was a subadult (1.5 yrs old) he'll probably do quite a bit of growing in the next year or so depending on resource availability.

What a mess! This is the crazy way we came up with weighing BooBoo.  In PA we had a tripod that we could hook the scale up to and we'd just hoist the bear up off the ground to weigh it.  Here we had to come up with a different method.  Maybe a better weighing system is something we can invest in if we get more funding!  BooBoo weighed about 100 lbs.  He may have been a little less since he was soaking wet in this picture :)

Here he is!  I liked this picture because he's sticking his tongue out.  What a cutie!  One thing you can't tell in the pictures is that because of how long it took for the drug to work, BooBoo was pretty aware of what was going on and even moving quite a bit.  Because of this we didn't take a tooth (a premolar that they don't use after a certain age) figuring he was a little too awake for that.  (Teeth can be used to age a bear).

Another picture with his tongue sticking out! So cute!!  That is my advisor in the picture with me.

Ok, now onto the second, larger of the two bears, Slick (named for his thinking he could get away with rolling the traps and stealing the bait!!)  I don't have as many pictures of this one since the other 3 guys that were there were helping me more than taking pictures. But I will say - I only had to jab Slick ONCE (not six times) and he went down in about 10 minutes (not 2 hours)!

Here Dr. Harveson (my advisor's husband and another professor on my graduate committee) is helping me put on the collar.  The Harvesons arrived after we did everything else on the bear.  It was good when that they showed up when they did though because all we had left was the collar and it was way to small for the bear! Not even close to fitting!!  So I freaked out a little before they got there wondering what I was going to do.  We ended up cutting off a piece of a regular radio collar and using it as a spacer to make the collar larger.

Another picture of putting the collar on.

Here is a close up of the collar on Slick.  As you can see there is a narrower material holding together the two wider parts of the collar.  That narrower piece is what we took from the other radio collar to use as a spacer.  This picture really shows how much bigger we had to make the collar in order for it to fit around his neck!

A good shot of his teeth!  We didn't get a chance to pull a tooth from Slick either because he was starting to wake up and we needed to get the collar on.  Plus he was between 230 and 250 lbs (because he was waking up we also couldn't get an exact weight on him) and I didn't want to pull a tooth out of bear that large that was waking up and moving his head and legs!  Anyway, depending on the wear and color of the teeth we could probably get an approximate age, but I've never done that so don't have any guesses... And by the way, do you see that little took barely coming through the gums behind his upper canine?  That is the premolar tooth we pull if we are pulling teeth.  Bears have four - and upper and lower left, and an upper and lower right.  Any of those can be pulled.

This is a picture of the culvert trap that we used to catch Slick.  As you can see it is quite a bit bigger than the barrel traps that we used to catch BooBoo.  A bigger bear like Slick seemed more comfortable going in a larger trap like this, rather than the smaller barrel traps.  Hopefully this trap will come in handy again in the future!

Here we are! Slick and I.  He was already moving a lot at this point.  We still couldn't resist getting some more pictures with him.  (In fact we kind of had to sit on him when we were putting the collar on since he was moving so much!)

Sticking his tongue out :)

I figured I'd put this picture in there so you can get some what of an idea of what the telemetry equipment looks like.  I'm hold the antenna up in one hand and the receiver in the other hand.  Telemetry equipment comes in various shapes and sizes, but all does the same thing.  In this picture I was listening for BooBoo the day after we caught him to see if he was still nearby and to make sure that the radio part of the collar was working properly.

Well that's pretty much all I have for the bear captures.  All these pictures were from the Harvesons, except the one of Slick's teeth (that one was from Richard, another graduate student that was there helping).  I know that he has more, and so do Dewey and Travis who work at Black Gap.  I'll try to get those from them since I think they got some good ones!  When I'm home in August and see a lot of you maybe I can show you some more pictures if you wanted to see them all :)

I can't start trapping bears again until we get more satellite collars.  Like I said, they are about $3500 each!  That's not very easy to get when we are already limited in the funding we have for this project.  I've already started getting in contact with some other wildlife organizations hoping they can help support our project financially and/or donate some collars.  I'm also hoping that we'll have a few more by this fall so that I can start trapping again as soon as possible (that is, if the bears haven't moved somewhere else!)

I guess that's it for now.  I'm planning on coming home to PA August 1st (or close to it).  Bob and I are getting married exactly one month from today!!  I'm so excited for that, and so excited to see everyone who is coming :)  Can't wait!