Curious Conversations, a Research Podcast

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Travis

What do you know about bears?

Despite living in Southwest Virginia, in an area I consider to be pretty bear friendly, I'm realizing that I don't know all that much about these animals. And most of what I do know is either from cartoons or social media feeds of bears crawling into trash cans or getting on back porches messing with cats and stuff. So I'm curious what I should know about bears, specifically black bears in Virginia. What are their populations look like right now? What are we learning about them? And what should I do if I encounter one?And thankfully Virginia Tech's Marcella and Kelly is an expert in this very topic and was kind enough to answer all these questions and more. Marcella is a professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation. She researches the dynamics and behaviors of elusive carnivores, including coyotes, bobcats, and black bears in the United States. And she studies jaguars, ocelots, pumas, tigers, and cheetahs abroad. Because we just don't have them here.

So talked with Marcella a little bit about how she got into this field and how she goes about studying these elusive animals. As I mentioned when we started, I don't really see bears all that often. You probably don't either. But we need to know more about them. And she's one of the people gathering that information. She shared what the current population of black bears in Virginia looks like and what some of the threats are to that population, as well as how warmer winters can impact black bears as they're supposed to be going into hibernation. And maybe most importantly, what should I do if I encounter a black bear in my backyard. So if you'd also like to be safe in your backyard, please stick around for that part of the podcast. I'm Travis Williams, and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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Travis

It sounds like your work is a lot of us trying to get a better understanding of what's happening in the wild with particularly animals. And so I'm curious how, I guess, how did you get into that field? Like what drove you to want to know what's out there?

Marcella

Yeah, think originally like a lot of kids, I wanted to work with animals. I always liked animals and I thought veterinarian was like the only path. Like that was the way to go. so as I worked through college and worked at vet hospitals and things like that, it just didn't quite resonate the way I thought it was going to for me. And so I kind of started exploring other things and I found that there was a wildlife department where I went to school at University of California at Davis and that department was great. I just all of a sudden realized, I like wildlife. I didn't realize that it was, it wasn't as attractive to domestic animals. I just thought that I was, I didn't really understand why. And then when I started working in that department and started taking classes, it just really resonated. And I really loved the idea of trying to discover new things about animals and also that we really didn't know that much about many wild animals despite the fact that they're all around us, but it's still a pretty open field and a lot of great questions to answer.

Travis

Yeah, and I want to get your insights on a lot of different animals, particularly ones that live around my house. But I'm curious, what are some of the ways that you're able to go about making some of these discoveries and getting a better understanding of what's happening in our forests and in our wild lands around us?

Marcella

Yeah, sure. A lot of times people think you can just go out and watch animals and it turns out that that's quite difficult to do if you've ever tried to do it yourself. And so we use a lot of remote technology or less invasive, maybe not non-invasive because if you put a remote camera out, it still often has a flash. It creates some disturbance, but it's not as invasive as say capturing an animal and putting a GPS collar or something like that on them.

And so we've been able to determine a lot of different things from using remotely triggered cameras, non-invasive genetic sampling. I tend to specialize in trying to estimate population size for carnivores and animals that are really difficult to study. And these techniques work really well, both the genetic sampling and the remote photography.

Travis

That's really cool. So you use a lot of, guess, like trail cams would be maybe a common term that I see on my social media feed a lot.

Marcella

Yep, yep. Trail cams is definitely what it's usually referred to by the general public. We tend to use remote remotely triggered cameras. They're the same thing. And I happened to be the one of the people that started using them when they were back in the day when they were film cameras in the early like 2000s. They just started to come on the market for researchers at that time. Mostly the only people using them were hunters. But I kind of credit hunters for like pushing the envelope because They started developing better and better cameras for hunters and then researchers caught on and were like, wow, this is a pretty good technique for trying to study animals in the wild in their natural habitat without having to try to go out and catch them and determine things about them, like how many there are or what their distribution is across a landscape without even seeing very many ever. I mean, you see tons of photos of them, but you hardly ever actually see the animals, particularly in...in forested environments like here around Blacksburg.

Travis

Yeah, with some of those earlier trail cameras that were filmed, did you have to just drop the film off at the pharmacy like the rest of us?

Marcella

Yeah, yeah, I I had also I worked both internationally and in the States and I had many comments through TSA saying maybe you should invest in these new digital cameras that are coming out and I'm like, I get what you're saying because I would have hundreds of rolls of film. And then, yep, I'd have to drop them off at here in Blacksburg, John's camera corner or whatever. He was the only one that kind of understood that this was a research project and that we had to like really, you know make sure that all the photos got developed and well developed and all that kind of stuff.

Travis

Yeah, yeah. Well, that is fascinating. Well, I know some of the work, I know you've done a lot of work in, I guess, Central South America related to big cats, but specifically here in Southwest Virginia and around Blacksburg. I know you've done a lot of work and you're doing some work related to bears. What are we trying to better understand about bears? Because I have seen, I've never personally seen a bear in my neighborhood, but I've seen some like...you know, things on Facebook, every now and then somebody will see like a bear on the porch. So what are we trying to understand with bears?

Marcella

Yeah, bears is a really interesting topic right now. Bears have been, I would say, recovered from historically low and almost extirpated populations, historically. And then through regulations and protection of the species, they have actually recovered. And they're now in pretty good numbers. But what we're seeing is an outbreak of mange in bear sarcoptic scabiae. And that's just like skin disease that is really itchy and causes crusty skin. And for bears, at least in Virginia right now, what's so hard about it is that a lot of bears are dying, like they're losing a lot of weight. They're losing so much hair that they potentially can't even make it through their winter hibernation. And so we're seeing a lot of bear death, which is a little bit strange. And it may have just been around in populations for a long time. It usually doesn't cause death, but it seems to be doing so in a lot of our bears in the state. so the Department of Wildlife Resources, the state agency that manages black bears, with us and is funding our project to examine these impacts of mange on bears and determine like, is it causing declines? What is the distribution of the mange? And so we're using a combination of genetic sampling and mark recapture. And then another professor is also using GPS collaring. So we're tackling it from a number of different angles.

Travis

What does the genetic sampling piece of that look like? I don't really know what that would be.

Marcella

Yeah, it's now kind of a standard technique for bears. Because bears are not individually identifiable, like a lot of large cats have spot patterns and you can ID individuals just by getting photographs from remote cameras, but bears are kind of uniformly black. it's hard to tell them apart to the individual level. But you can do that with genetics. So if you can get genetic samples, you can go all the way down to the individual so we can count bears.

So what we do is we go out in the forest and we find some trees that are close enough together and we wrap some barbed wire around three to five trees, making what we call a corral. And then the bears will bait it in the middle with something that smells sweet and delicious. So they will come into the corral trap and then we usually use two strands of barbed wire. So they'll go over or under or in between the strands and it snags their hair. And then we go every week, the team goes weekly.

We take those hairs and make sure they have follicles. We'll put them in coin envelopes. And then one of my graduate students will analyze that in a genetics lab. And then once she's run the PCRs and extracted DNA, then we send it to another lab to actually do that individual genotyping. So yeah, it's kind of involved, but it's actually a pretty good... The front end is actually kind of low budget. It's not very expensive to buy some barbed wire and some...you know, some raspberry scent lure and stuff like that. But the backend's a little bit more expensive where you have to do the genetic analysis. But it's very effective for estimating how many bears there are on the landscape.

Travis

Yeah, and sounds like it leverages kind of the same insight that I gained from Winnie the Pooh as a child. Just put the honey out and the bear will get stuck.

Marcella

They love it, I can't resist. But we were worried, we were worried that mangy bears would not come into the corral traps because they might be, they might be like so irritated by the mange that they lose their appetite or their behavior might be different or they might not want to go through the scratchy barbed wire. So we ended up pairing remote cameras at every single one of our hair snares to see if they would go in and we...found that yes, they are going in to the traps and they are, and even still when they lose a lot of hair, they often have like this little mohawk of hair along the top of their head or their spine. And so we are still getting hairs from mangy bears as well. So that was the big worry, know, can you estimate how many mangy bears there are out there and how many healthy bears there are? So that's kind of what we're doing with the pairing it with the remote cameras.

Travis

Is there a way to treat mangy bears?

Marcella

There is, you can use like any classic kind of deworming medicine, an ivermectin, but they can get it again. They get reinfected. And so it's just, unfortunately not, it's not a hundred percent effective at well, it's not that effective because they can just get reinfected. it's without like constantly reapplying and reapplying, it's not really a viable way to treat them.

 

That said, some do recover on their own. So it's not, it's not a death sentence necessarily, but some don't. So, and we don't know why some bears recover, why some never get it and why some do succumb and die from it. So yeah, and they don't die from the mange itself. It's really become from becoming emaciated and then secondary infections hit. And so it's, it's more just all these secondary features that, that happen and cause the decline of the bear.

Travis

Yeah. Well, I'm curious from like a Department of Wildlife perspective or maybe just a, I don't know, a societal perspective for lack of better terms. What concern is there about having a decreasing black bear population? What might that, what's the ripple effect?

Marcella

Yeah, that's a good question. It kind of depends on what you're talking about in terms of like people love seeing bears and that's people that view bears and bear hunters and so there is a human component of people really being upset if they are both a bear hunter or a bear watcher because they really want to interact with the animal in some way and if they're declining we kind of lose that across the landscape and so that's one.

That's one issue. Of course, there's also other issues of how do bears interact with other species on the landscape, like coyotes, bobcats, foxes, animals like that, or prey animals, deer, or berries, because they eat a lot of berries, and acorns, and stuff like that. So you could lose these interactions that happen between the animals themselves. It depends on whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's hard to say, it kind of depends on your perspective. Bears will eat deer, so they will eat fawns, but they also will disperse lots of plants across the landscape. So, you know, lots of berries and all that through eating and then moving along and passing those through their system. so there could be repercussions that we don't quite know about since bears are only recently recovered. So, yeah, so there's just still some unknowns in this realm.

Travis

Sounds like maybe we're trying to strike a balance of just having a healthy population, but not too many or too few. Right, right. It would be the way that I would look at it.

Marcella

Yeah, exactly. And then of course, people, some people wonder, well, will this man just run its course? And then there's a die, die, and then the rest that survive are somehow maybe immune to it or healthy or stronger or who knows what. And that very well also could be. We just don't, we just don't really know. But we do. We would like to know if it's causing at least causing a decline at this point and see, is it, is it that strong of a disease that it could really knock the population back again?

Travis

Do we know anything about how suburban expansion into previously wild wooded areas, how that impacts the bear population? I think about that just because of the places that I live and there's subdivisions and stuff. A lot of times they increase the link, kind of move into and grow into those areas as areas grow. What do we know about how that impacts animals like bears?

Marcella

Well, we definitely have seen increases in human wildlife or human-bear conflict. As people move into bear habitat and bears are already there, they're obviously going to come into contact with bears. And bears do sometimes fairly well around human habitation, which is amazing considering they're such a large animal. And so unfortunately, they will get into bird feeders, they will get into garbage sometimes kind of get around people's houses if they find a food source. And so that is something that is likely to increase if we end up continuing to expand into the kind of wild lands interface kind of area. And so that is, you know, we just need to educate the public, you know, on how to deal with that. If we want to have this coexistence between humans and wild animals, and that's true for a lot of animals, not just bears, but bears is definitely one that comes into conflict with humans.

Travis

Yeah, are there any good, are there any good guidance? Do you have any good guidance, I guess I should say on like de-escalation techniques? If I find a bear or a burr feeder, like I don't want to get into a fight. I don't want to make it worse than it needs to be. So what should I do?

Marcella

that probably the best thing to do is remove those feeders and I know it sounds sad because of course I I feed birds too I love seeing them and you know it's really fun to what to birdwatch but if those seeds are there repeatedly the bear is going to keep coming back and you can try to haze them as much as you want but if that food source sometimes is so attractive to them and you know my funny story is we used to keep our bird seed outside in a locked tub and then one day that tub went missing, the whole tub. And we found it in the forest, like, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred meters away, all ripped up and all the seeds eaten, the whole entire like bag of seeds. And so I was like, wow, guess we'll be keeping that inside now.

Travis

Some bear got the jackpot.

Marcella

That pair probably slept for a couple days after eating 40 pounds of...

Travis

Yeah, yeah. Well, I've heard some people maybe speculate that maybe having warmer winters has increased maybe some interactions with bears. And so I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm just curious how might a warmer winter season impact bears and the bear population as a whole?

Marcella

Yeah, that's a great question too, because everybody's thinking about that with the animals that hibernate. How does that impact them going down into hibernation and back up from hibernation? And we've done a little bit of research on that actually. And we have found that bears are particularly susceptible to higher temperatures as they're going into hibernation that if.

The temperature is hotter longer or if it bounces around a lot and keeps getting hot after, especially after all the trees have lost their leaves and there's no food on the landscape, that they won't hibernate if the temperature keeps popping up. And so that is something that we notice. It doesn't happen as much, at least we haven't picked up the signal of that on the back end of coming out of hibernation, but the going into seems to be very much more driven by temperature than just that photo period or the amount of light.

It's a combination of the two for the other for coming out of hibernation. But of course, the worry is that mismatch right between the plants available on the landscape and the hibernation schedule of the bears. And so if they're up and they can't get down to go to sleep, then they might have to search for other food sources if they're still hungry or trying to get ready for hibernation and fatten up for the big sleep. So yeah.

Travis

I mean, it makes sense to me because I find it harder sometimes to go to sleep in an uncomfortable setting than to just stay asleep. With hibernation, is it mostly a concern that they won't have food if they wake up or do they also need like the rest or the sleep? Does that impact them?

Marcella

No, it's much more about just avoiding the time period where there's no food on the landscape. So this is how they figured it out. Their physiology is amazing that they can do that. And just, you know, I'm out for a few months here and then I'll come back when there's food available. Exactly. And, know, we see this in Florida. mean, Florida has bears and some of them don't hibernate at all. Some do and some don't. And it just depends, I think, on

Travis

I will sleep until the next meal.

Marcella

The temperature of Florida is pretty warm, but it also has more food on the landscape year round than we do here. They don't have that kind of know, snowy kind of winter that we can get in the Appalachian Mountains. And so I think, I think that their physiology is hardwired, but also flexible when it comes to this, this temperature and food availability thing. So, so yeah, so it is pretty interesting. So, I mean, it could happen that bears have less time hibernating here, but what...the crux of the matter is, will the plants be available on the landscape or not? And some plants are more hardwired to photo period than they are to temperature. And so it could be the issue, or they could come out. You know, I think about it in spring when plants like we keep having these late frosts and a lot of my plants start like leafing out and then they die. It's like, so what if that happens and bears are out on the landscape and then we get a really hard or more frequent hard frosts spring so that it could be another issue. So those are things we're kind of just thinking about and trying to study in bears.

Travis

Well, what is maybe a misunderstanding that a lot of folks have particularly about bears or wildlife in general in southwest Virginia?

Marcella

I think a lot of people are maybe afraid of bears and I mean they are a big animal but they generally are pretty shy. They don't really, they're not really gonna come at you. That's as a general rule. Now I will say you should always be careful around wildlife. Don't be doing any kind of feeding or you know any of that. But that in general the most of the interactions the bear will just run away. advantage of that. from you, is almost, that is the most common. Or we'll ignore you and walk on through the woods. And so I do think there's sometimes the fear of wildlife is sometimes maybe more than it needs to be. I think most don't want to interact with us. And so that's, you know, that's fine. Probably best for both of us, you know, although we do like watching wildlife, of course but just being careful not to get too close or feed animals or those kinds of

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Travis

And thanks to Marcella for helping us better understand wildlife research and specifically black bears in Virginia. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt.edu. I'm Travis Williams and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

 

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