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"Watch out for bears," my friend M said as I got out the truck.
"Hah, yeah right," I replied as I shut the door and waved him off.
It was around 0500, which is scientist code for 5:00 in the morning. It was still dark out, which was kind of the point. M had dropped me off on the side of the gravel road and left, but that was the plan. Often as a field biologist, we are required to do seemingly crazy things like get up at 0430, drive into the woods, and get out of the truck and walk into the woods alone before sunrise. Or maybe it’s actually crazy and not just seemingly crazy.
I was at Red River Wildlife Management Area* in April 2006, working for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries as a student worker. I worked for them during my college years, doing a variety of tasks in a variety of places, in a variety of conditions. This particular time was during spring break, when the students were allowed to work 40 hours a week (as opposed to 20 hours a week when classes were in), so M and I were out here for the week to work.
Red River Wildlife Management Area is one of my favorite places, despite it's free standing shrub like stands of poison ivy. It's nestled in the arms of the Mississippi River, near the Old River Control Structure. When the river is low, you can drive for a mile inside the levee before you ever find water. And when the river is up, you can stand on the levee and see nothing but water for as far as the eyes can see.
Red River is 70,000 acres of mostly very typical bottomland hardwood forest, full of diverse set of species. Backwater flooding is common, and species are adaptable to flooded and not flooded conditions. It's home to songbirds, turkeys, deer, hogs, and yes even the occasional bear. The WMA also features moist soil units for waterfowl habitat (where I did some of my master's research), dove fields, and
M and I were at Red River that week to do spring songbird point counts. Point count surveys are a systematic way of assessing species abundance and diversity. A set of points are predetermined at a standard distance apart, and the biologist will go to those points, wait for disturbance effect to end, and then start the count. During the count, bird species, direction, distance, and number are recorded. After repeating this process multiple times in an area it’s possible to get an idea of population sizes and species diversity. Example: If you only hear 3 birds the whole morning, populations are low. If you hear 15 species and 200 birds in a morning, you have a much stronger bird population. Repeating surveys across a whole area, like a wildlife management area, or in various different habitat types gives you an idea of which species use which habitat types and how many birds there are. It's a very common method in the bird world.
To do point counts, you have to be out there when the birds are most active so you can detect them. Songbirds are most active singing and calling before dawn to mid-morning. So if you want to do point count surveys for singing birds during the breeding season, that’s when you are going to be doing field work.
The truck tail lights disappear around the bend, and I stand in the middle of the road assessing my situation. It's 0500, it's pitch dark out, but I have a headlamp. I also have a can of bug spray in my pants pocket, a bottle of water in the other pants pocket, a hat, a knife, and my clipboard with an assortment of pencils. That's it.
I think to myself: I sure hope I don't see a bear. Not only am I not exactly prepared but I have never had a bear encounter before. Also, M would be pissed if I see a bear and he doesn't. So I decide I'm going to make as much noise as possible before sunrise to scare off any large lurking mammals. Or at least until I can see beyond my headlamp's circle of light.
Louisiana Black Bears (Ursus americanus luteolus) are a subspecies of the regular black bear, and at the time of this story were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.** At the time, the populations of black bears were semi isolated and kind of scattered. Bears were being reintroduced to areas like Red River, so the idea of seeing a bear in the woods was totally in the realm of possibility. M and I knew there were bears out there, but had never seen one ourselves during our time working there. We'd heard stories from the biologists though about bears seen in trees during timber cruises, about helping release relocated bears, and field stories from grad students studying black bears. M and I are bird people, we don't usually have to worry about coming face to face with a person sized bird that may or may not be in a predatory mood.
However, black bears in Louisiana are a different beast than black bears in the rest of the country. For starters, they're not as habituated to humans and tend to be frightened by our presence. When wildlife of any species is habituated to humans and loses that self preservation fear is when wildlife and human conflicts occur. Some black bears have since gotten into dumpsters and the like closer to human habitation, but for the most part black bears are not a huge disruption in Louisiana. They live mostly in large stretches of undeveloped habitat in the Atchafalaya Basin, which is good for them and good for young student workers who have no idea what to do if they see a bear in the woods.
At the time, we had printed out maps with points on it. Distances were measured in "chains" - which is 66 feet. A chain is an old unit of measurement from land surveying days in the 16th and 17th centuries. It's not widely used anymore except in agriculture and timber. Because I was working for the forestry department, all our measurements were in chains. 1 chain = 66ft, and 80 chains = 1 mile. It's super logical just like the rest of the imperial system.
So to find my first point, I had to enter at a specific mark from the road, pace a certain number of chains in a certain trajectory, and I'd be at my point. So that's what I did. I entered the road where I was supposed to, paced the distance in the right direction, and arrived at my first point count.
En route to my second point, I encountered another ridiculously large blackberry patch (damn Rubus!) so I paced left to go around it. This let me walk through a slough which was way better walking than blackberries. So I walked down this slough, crashing over things, not exactly trying to be quiet at all. I was mostly thinking that I didn't want to walk up on any hogs and that maybe all my noise would scare them off before I got there. On this new course I had to climb over this rather large downed tree, which is much easier to traverse than a blackberry patch, and when I landed on the other side I saw something in the blackberries ahead of me.
When doing point counts, you have to wait a few minutes from the time you arrive for the disturbance caused by your arrival to settle down and birds to return to normal activity. In those few minutes you stand quietly and just listen and wait. It's a remarkable way to observe the world around you because you are literally forced to quietly stand still and do nothing except listen and look. It's amazing what you can hear in the woods early in the morning when you're quite and alone.
After the disturbance period, I did my point count, and started pacing to my second point. The points were in a grid and I started at one of the bottom corners. I'd go up the side, and snake my way across the grid until I reached the other end and then exited back onto the road. If I needed to go around any obstacles that limited my straight line pacing, I would pace around the obstacle, pace forward, pace back to the original line, then continue. Basically you made a big open sided square around the obstacle so you kept track of the number of chains you paced between points.
It was just around sunrise now and everything in the woods was a bit grey. It wasn't light, exactly, and I still had my headlamp on, but I could see a bit outside of my circle of light like I couldn't 45 minutes earlier. All I could see ahead of me was that the blackberry shrubs were moving.
So I stopped.
So I stopped.
I saw the blackberry bushes moving ahead of me, but didn't really hear anything. I was standing with my back against the tree I had just climbed over, of which the top was was about waist high. I watched the bushes for a few seconds, then I saw a small black creature on the edge of it. At first I thought it was a young hog but it was hard to tell in the morning sunrise greyness.
Only this creature was furry. That's weird. Then I saw a second small black creature. Also furry. That's when I realized that it was definitely not hogs and that it was two black bear cubs. CUBS.
But where was mama bear?
At this point I was assessing my situation. I had a metal clipboard and bug spray with which to defend myself if I had somehow gotten between mother bear and cub bears. I was not that far from the road, but I was very far from M. I had my cell phone with me just in case, but it was rather pointless because there was no cell service out there. Climbing a tree is out of the question since I couldn't reach any branches, and also bears are better climbers. I wasn't at my second point yet, and what I needed to do to reach my second point was pace back to my right a little ways to get back on track from avoiding the first blackberry patch, then pace forward another 2 chains. So I wasn't that far from my next point at all. I had my back against a tree, two cubs in front of me, a point count spot not far away from this location, no idea where mama bear was, and not much else in the way of ideas of what to do.
It felt like minutes but it was in reality only a few seconds for my brain to process all that.
The cubs were only 30 feet away, and all I could think about was where the mother bear was, and what I would do if she came after me to defend herself and her cubs from this early morning intruder. The few seconds between seeing the cubs and trying to find the mother bear were the longest of my life.
But mama bear showed up real soon and luckily she was right behind the cubs munching on some blackberries. She stood up to her full height and looked at me over the top of the blackberry patch. She didn't see super disturbed by my presence, and didn't do anything threatening. My best guess is she thought I was a hog, because I was making a lot of hog noises while crashing through the woods trying not to walk up on wildlife, or didn't sense me as a threat. Either way, I had no intention of staying and finding out how tolerant she might be.
I was still standing up against the downed tree, so I climbed over it backwards, trying to keep an eye on the bear family. I didn't want to turn my back on them right away so I just kept backing away until they were out of sight. Then I turned around and high tailed it out of the woods as fast as I could. It didn't seem like the bear was coming after me in any way but I didn't want to hang out and possibly provoke her.
As I was high tailing it out of the woods I walked right up on a sleeping deer. I scared it and it jumped up and ran away and it doing that scared the hell out of me! Between the bear encounter and jumping a deer I was a nervous mess by the time I reached the road.
M wasn't supposed to pick me back up for a few hours, and I knew where he was at a few miles down the road, so I started walking down the road, figuring I'd just meet him there instead of sitting on the side of the road doing nothing. I also figured there was probably not much chance of further wildlife encounters in the middle of the road.
So I just started walking towards the truck, which was a few miles away. I heard a truck coming up behind me on the road, but nobody else we worked with should have been around there, so I jumped into the blackberry bushes (damn Rubus!) on the side of the road so nobody would see me. You never know who is going to be on these WMA roads and I definitely didn't want to deal with random yahoos that early in the morning, especially as a lone female walking down the road, even if I was wearing LDWF attire. It wasn't a work truck anyway so I stayed hidden and then continued on my way after they passed. It took me awhile to walk to the vehicle but I made it there while M was still in the woods.
When M got out of the woods and saw me sitting on the truck, he was confused. After I told him what had happened, he was pissed as predicted that I saw bears that morning and he didn't. I still haven't heard the end of it! And since I didn't finish my transect, he went the next day and did it, hoping to see bear family. He didn't. I haven't heard the end of that yet, either. I don't know if M has since seen a Louisiana black bear, but I'm not in a hurry to ask him just yet.
Later that day our supervisor, the forester for the WMA, asked me "Was she collared?" Honestly, I don't know. I still don't, to this day. I assume she was, but I didn't have the presence of mine to look for a radio collar when I was scared by the whole encounter. I'm not even sure I could see her neck because she was behind the blackberries. It's possible she was, because black bears are well studied by biologists from a variety of agencies working together to manage the population.
Essentially running away from a family of black bears and not finishing my field work for that morning may seem like a rookie maneuver, and it probably is. In hindsight, I could have calmly paced back to the first point, paced over to a further away transect line, and continued my point counts from there and just skipped a few of them to give the bears space instead of skipping the whole set. But at the time, I was 21 years old, a student worker who hadn't spent a ton of time in the woods alone in the dark, and not particularly keen on having a second run in with a family of bears even if they didn't seem to be bothered by my presence. Ultimately M went back the next day and redid the whole set, hoping to see bears, but he didn't and I didn't see any on the rest of my point count sites for the rest of the week.
I feel really lucky to have seen a Louisiana black bear in such a peaceful and natural setting, even if I was 85% terrified. I was not even a little bit prepared to see a bear, though maybe you never really are. I've since seen one other Louisiana black bear - a big male further north in the Louisiana Mississippi Alluvial Valley. I was lucky enough to see him running across a field first thing in the morning, and I was also lucky enough to be on a 4 wheeler and not on foot in the woods. I was able to enjoy that experience much more knowing the bear was moving away from me and knowing I had a safety net vehicle. They are really beautiful creatures.
I've got another bear story to tell, about a young grizzly, but I'll share that for another post!
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*Red River WMA is now Richard K Yancey WMA. It was renamed in 2017 in honor of Richard K Yancey and his work for wildlife as a former LDWF biologist, Assistant Secretary in the Office of Wildlife, and one of the forces behind the creation of the Tensas National Wildlife Refuge.
**The Louisiana black bear is now considered "recovered" under the Endangered Species Act and numbers between 500-700 individuals in the wild, according to USFWS.
