Unbearably Charismatic

There is something about bears that sets them apart from other large North American mammals. Though sometimes feared, they are far more loved, especially as they look a bit like dogs—a distant ancestor. Adorable and human-looking, bears are far less fearsome than the wild cats, and nowhere near as reviled as coyotes—fellow omnivores that also like to hunt in our gardens.

That may help explain why concern about bears is growing, even though the animal is common, widespread, and not particularly threatened. In Albuquerque, bear love reached a peak in 2013, when hundreds of distressing incidents were reported—bears hit by cars, climbing trees at Albuquerque Academy, foraging in gardens in Corrales. It was a drought year and a fire year, and bears (who live in the mountains) have little recourse when food there grows scarce. They need to eat.

2013 was also the year that saw an unusual, spontaneous gathering of interest among official groups that deal with bears. Bernalillo County Open Space has a citizen-scientist training program known as the Master Naturalists, and they put out a call for groups interested in joining a Sandia Mountain Bear Collaborative. Instantly, ten organizations had joined, each for its own reasons, brought together by their fascination with bears.

Fast-forward to 2015, and the Sandia Mountain Bear Collaborative has kicked into high gear. Volunteers from all ten organizations—Albuquerque Open Space, Bernalillo County Open Space, Bosque School, New Mexico Game & Fish, New Mexico State University, Pathways, Sandia Mountain Natural History Center, Sandia Pueblo, the U.S. Forest Service, and UNM—are fanning out across the mountain from June through August, collecting samples of bear fur snagged in barbed-wire snares set up to draw the animals to a scented lure.

Strung among trees in a way that forces bears to crawl tightly beneath to investigate the skunky, bloody scent, the wire snares target the hair follicle, which can be analyzed for DNA that will identify specific individuals, their gender and relatedness. As a citizen-science project funded by the state Department of Game & Fish, the survey has a strict protocol: The mountain has been divided into a grid, and each nearly 10-square-mile plot is visited by volunteers everytwo weeks to collect any fur and move the snare to a new site. The goal is to get a more accurate idea of how many bears live in, or frequent, the Sandia.

It’s a great example of how wildlife enthusiasts can be put to work logging hours of fieldwork that government agencies could not otherwise afford, and do it happily—scrambling through dense brush carrying jars of cooked cattle blood and bales of barbed wire, crazy for the bears and the science.

For the group Pathways: Wildlife Corridors of New Mexico, the bear study is a natural extension of its work mapping the movement of wildlife across the remaining open space between mountain ranges, with an eye to keeping these corridors safe for passage.

Sandia Mountain is a core area for bear, cougar, and deer, said the group’s co-founder, Peter Callen. “But it’s also mostly surrounded by city, roads, and human habitation. So this makes these common animals, not protected by endangered-species status, especially vulnerable, as it’s difficult for them to move to and from the Sandia. So it makes accurate knowledge of the numbers that much more important.”

For land agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and Bernalillo County Open Space, tracking wildlife is part of their mandate to manage public lands. “We have a number of properties in the East Mountains that are prime habitat for wildlife, especially bears,” said Colleen McRoberts, coordinator for Bernalillo County Open Space. “We had known the bears frequent those areas because we saw lots of evidence—tracks and scat, primarily. I was curious to learn more about the bears and their corridors, and how we might be connected to other corridors.”

Volunteers in McRoberts’ Master Naturalist program put up motion-sensor cameras and began studying bear movement. At the same time, wildlife cameras were being watched at the Sandia Mountain Natural History Center, an arm of the state Museum of Natural History & Science that serves school groups. Knowing that other groups had wildlife cameras in the area gave rise to the idea of sharing information, said instructor Chris Modelski.

For the natural history center, education was the motivation for joining the bear hair study. “The whole project transforms into teaching possibilities for the kids who come here, so kids can get an idea of what the scientific steps are to figuring out a bear population,” Modelski said.

Bosque School students Anna Malvin and Zoe Van Nortwick worked on analyzing bear scat that had been collected the first year, and found working on a multi-agency project “pretty amazing,” Malvin said. “Neither of us had done any sort of work with bears before, but we both love wildlife and certainly learned a lot.”

The scientific survey also, naturally, has political ramifications for a number of the agencies, since the numbers can be used to guide policy. The New Mexico Department of Game & Fish, which is charged with managing wildlife in the state, has not done a comprehensive study of the bear population in the Sandia since 2001. That study was largely based on radio collaring of trapped animals and computer modeling of habitat, according to Matt Gould, the biologist who is analyzing the bear hair samples. Game & Fish puts the Sandia bear population at 50 to 75 animals—a figure that is clearly long out of date.

Gould, a doctoral student at New Mexico State University, had been doing a bear-hair study for Game & Fish in Northern New Mexico when the collaborative asked him to include the Sandia, using their own volunteer labor. Hair-snare analysis is a widely used, reliable, and far less expensive sampling technique than radio collaring, Gould said. But it does take time. Volunteers collected 187 hair samples last summer and sent them to the DNA lab in Canada, but the analysis had not been completed even as the second year of sampling began.

This delay has led to a sticky situation for Game & Fish, which happens to be conducting its regular review of hunting regulations for bear and cougar, scheduled every four years. The agency, which is known for catering to livestock and hunting interests, proposes increasing the kill limits on both species, even though it has no solid data on population, only outdated estimates.

At a public hearing on the proposal in Taos in June, the agency’s wildlife management chief, Stewart Lyle, was questioned on the science behind the proposal. Lyle made vague reference to habitat surveys and data from neighboring states, and noted that the bear-hair data would be available before the policy-setting Game Commission makes its final decision on the new hunting limits at a meeting Aug. 27.

The agency had even less to say about its cougar data, which was criticized by several speakers for coming from an unpublished master’s thesis. The vast majority of people who testified at the Game & Fish hearing protested increased hunting limits for either animal, and many also opposed making it easier for landowners to trap cougars on their property.

“The department is asking the public to accept whatever they say on blind faith, without any evidence,” said Phil Carter, wildlife campaign manager for Animal Protection New Mexico. “The issue at stake is that Game & Fish is not bound by the best science, like the federal government is under the National Environmental Policy Act.” So while the state is busy conducting a thorough, multi-year bear population survey using the best science, it is not bound to usethat data in its decisions. “They can have data that says one thing and go in the other direction,” Carter explained.

Why would our state wildlife agency invest three years and more than a million dollars to learn about an animal it considers a nuisance? We tried speaking with the agency’s biologist in charge of bear and cougar, Rick Winslow, but were referred to a spokesman, who advised us to read the transcript of the Taos hearing for an “in-depth presentation” on the subject.

It appears that even Game & Fish operates by a double standard, since no new population studies have been proposed for cougar, and citizen scientists are not rallying around a New Mexico Mountain Lion Collaborative, even though the rare cat has seen its hunting limits increased to the point where hunters cannot even approach the limit.

“People have more of an emotional attachment to bears,” Modelski said of the stark contrast. “I don’t know why that is. I think a lot of people feel that the big cats are more of a threat.”