June 02–Machete in hand, Walter McCown tromped into a tangled thicket of thorns and fronds in pursuit of bears.
The blade was for the underbrush, not the bears.
“Bears make their livin’ here,” McCown said as he and fellow biologist Carolyn Enloe whacked at saw palmettos and gallberry bushes in Rock Springs Run, clearing an 8-by-10-foot site.
Their work will help the Florida Fish Wildlife Conservation Commission estimate how many bears roam the state’s forests, hammocks and, increasingly, its suburbs.
Cordoned off by two strands of barbed wire, the hewn patch will be baited with raspberry-jelly doughnuts this week and turned into one of 200 bear “hair snares” throughout Central Florida — the first area to be counted in FWC’s two-year $500,000 population project.
Researchers hope the big animals climb in for a fattening snack and leave a tuft of hair on a barb for DNA testing.
The agency will use the DNA results to identify and catalog individual bears, calculate densities and estimate the population and range of Florida’s largest native land mammal. The state has not tried to tally up its bears in more than a decade.
The last, best guess put the number of Florida black bears at a few beasts short of 3,000 with a third or more roaming Central Florida greenbelts, woodlands and, unfortunately for both humans and bears, residential neighborhoods in Seminole County.
“We’re pretty sure it’s going to be a whole lot more than that now,” McCown said.
In a span of five months, bears attacked two women in Central Florida, the worst maulings in the state’s history. The two incidents led FWC to kill nine bears and catch and relocate three others, including the mother bear blamed in one of the attacks.
The population survey, planned by the state before the maulings in Wingfield North and Carisbrooke, is crucial for the state’s wildlife agency as it reevaluates management strategy for bears, a species listed as “threatened” as recently as 2012.
The data, for instance, will determine if bears captured in neighborhoods can be moved to the Ocala National Forest.
“If we find a high density in the forest, as we suspect we will, we may start making decisions not to relocate bears there,” said Mike Orlando, FWC’s black-bear expert. “You’d be stacking bears on top of bears, and that would be no solution.”
The findings also will provide FWC commissioners with data to decide whether to reinstate bear hunting and, if so, where.
“In public meetings, we are asked all the time, ‘How many bears are out there?’ Orlando said. “People laugh when we say 3,000. It seems to them they’ve got that many in their backyards. The truth is, because our data sets are 10 years old, we don’t know.”
State experts say anecdotal evidence, including a record number of citizen calls to Florida’s wildlife hotline, suggests the population is surging. Central Florida tops the state in nuisance-bear complaints.
Bear kills on roadways are a growing problem too. The state documented 232 bears killed in 2013 by vehicle strikes — and more than half were in the region that includes Orange, Lake, Seminole and Volusia counties.
“I could say lots of roadkill equals lots of bears, lots of [nuisance] calls equals lots of bears, but those aren’t good measures. One bear, as we’ve seen, can generate lots of calls from a neighborhood,” said David Telesco, FWC’s bear management coordinator.
“I think what the study will do is put a number on what we suspect — our bear population is really growing fast.”
All the hair-snares should be in place by the end of the week. None will be near neighborhoods.
Next week, doughnuts will be dangled about six feet off the ground from a wire tied between two trees. Researchers will follow up weekly, making rounds through July to collect hair and re-bait the snares, each marked with a sign: “Bear Research Site.”
This year’s survey will focus on bear populations in a region stretching west from the coast across Jacksonville and the Osceola National Forest to Suwannee County and south from Georgia through the Ocala National Forest and Orange County.
FWC will build 300 “hair snares” in the region, including the 200 in Central Florida.
Next year, the state will build an estimated 500 snares in the Panhandle, southwest Florida and other areas where bears are believed to have healthy footholds.
McCown described Central Florida’s forests, particularly Wekiwa Springs State Park and the Ocala National Forest, as a “bear pump” that produces more and more of the voracious omnivores that nosh in the wild on acorns, berries and palmetto hearts.
But when competition heats up or food runs low, they roam into neighborhoods.
McCown called bears “stomachs with legs” explaining why the state needs to know how many are out there.
“Some of them find suitable habitat away from people and live long, happy bear lives,” he said. “But some of them, they show up in people’s neighborhoods, in garages and backyard patios in the suburbs of Orlando…That’s a problem.”
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