As it would for the typical U.S. Census taker, the work of counting bears in the woods starts with a clipboard and a blank piece of paper.
Armed with this equipment — along with bear spray and, perhaps more importantly, tick repellent — a team of researchers has been fanning out to hundreds of survey stations set up across western Connecticut this summer to collect data on the area’s resident population of black bears. Their goal is to conduct the first scientific survey of the state’s bear population in over a decade.
The project is a collaboration between the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the Carnivore and Population Ecology Lab at Mississippi State University, which has conducted similar population surveys of black bears for several other state wildlife agencies.
Instead of trying to locate bears in the wild, the survey relies on hair samples collected in barbed wire traps, which can be used to identify individual bears based on their DNA. Researchers will later come up with a population estimate based on how many different bears they identified and how often those bears showed up in the samples across different geographic areas.
“It’s basically forensics, right,” said Dana Morin, the principal investigator at the Mississippi State lab, who holds a Ph.D. in wildlife conservation. “It’s the same idea as identifying somebody from saliva or something like that.”
The work begins each weekday morning, when members of the 10-person research team head out to collect samples from their daily list of traps. The traps consist of two strands of barbed wire wrapped around multiple trees with a scented lure in the center.
What scents are best for attracting bears? The standard setup, honed through similar projects in other states, uses a small pile of sticks sprayed with used doughnut grease along with a tampon soaked in raspberry extract, which is suspended from a line running through the center of the corral. Both lures are intended to attract bears while not providing them with actual food that can habituate them to humans.
“If a bear is in the area, it might sniff it due to their curiosity, but they’re not going to be coming back because there’s no calories to be gained from it,” said Connor Kurz, the project manager and a research associate at Morin’s lab.
In order to spot hair among the dark hues of the forest floor, researchers use a sheet of white paper pegged to a clipboard to provide a bright background, which they pass slowly underneath the strands of wire. Even to their discerning eyes, it’s not always clear whether the hair is that of a bear or some other furry mammal.
“Bears can come in all different colors,” Kurz says. “Typically, here in the Northeast, they’re going to be black with a brown muzzle, and sometimes they’ll have a white chest blaze. But in other states, they can be brown, cinnamon, red, even white.”
For that reason, any hair collected from the traps is bagged and documented to be sent back to Morin’s lab in Mississippi for genetic testing. The researchers also note any other signs of bear activity in the area, such as footprints, scat or a sighting of a live bear. The population estimate, however, will be based solely on the DNA collected from the hair samples and what that indicates about the number of individual bears living in the area.
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