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Black bears do not live in one spot their whole lives. Like many other animals, they must roam to find seasonal foods that may not all grow and ripen in one area. They need to establish their own territories when they become young adults. They need places to raise their young, called denning sites. And they need places that provide different types of cover and escape routes during the year. Typically, female adult black bears have a smaller home range than males, usually limited to about 5,000 acres. A large adult male, needing more food, and larger breeding areas, may roam in an area four times larger than that.

Black bears may become a nuisance to campers, and have to be relocated to another area, sometimes a couple of hundred miles away. Some persistent bears have been documented, through the use of radio telemetry / collars, as walking ten miles per day to get back to their home territory. Traveling mostly at night, bears can cover a lot of ground when they have a reason to. Going back home or heading off to a prime food spot are good bear reasons to travel.

During a project period from 1992 to 1997 in the area of Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada, bear biologists monitored black bear movements. It was noted that breeding territories have been as large as 53 miles with an average of 25 miles. However, after breeding season, some of the large males have traveled over 621 miles in search of prime food areas.

Put quite simply, black bears walk around a lot.

WILDLIFE CORRIDORS PROTECT ANIMAL MOVEMENTS

A wildlife corridor is a long path that an animal takes to get to another location within its territory, or outside its territory. Animals use wildlife corridors for different reasons, such as to find a mate, to find food, to find water, or to find a home and establish its territory. A good wildlife corridor provides shelter and cover to an animal while it is traveling. Sometimes a corridor may just be the path that that animal takes, and it may cross roads and meander through fields.

It is important to know where established wildlife corridors are located, because developers may inadvertently build structures right on a bear path. When an area of land is developed with no thought or research of possible wildlife corridors, the animals that use those paths then have to either go around the new obstacle, go through the obstacle, or decide to go back where they came from. Thoughtless planning for development in wild areas that are in bear habitat, forces bears to enter towns or residential areas, or isolates them in smaller fragmented habitats.

Sometimes private landowners, such as ones in Louisiana, set aside wooded land on their property to provide black bears with corridors, so that they can move around without crossing roads and residential yards. Bears that have no other way to get to where they are going, are often killed on roads by cars and trucks.

Here is an true story of a bear that walked around a lot!

BEARS TAKE A WALKING TOUR OF THE DELTA

By Brad Young

Black Bear Program Leader

Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks

This whole ordeal started in July of 2006. I received an email from Mike Hooker, research associate with the University of Tennessee, telling me that one of the radio-collared females they were monitoring had crossed from Arkansas into Mississippi and was now located somewhere around the town of Percy. “She’s wearing a bright orange collar, so you’ll probably get a few calls from people seeing her,” he said. I had no idea at the time just how true that would be.

Female bears are a rare commodity in Mississippi. In fact, we are only aware of around five or six female bears in the entire state. I knew that she had a newborn cub in Arkansas but doubted that the cub had made the journey across the river with her. I was wrong. Trail camera photos taken on private land showed the cub was still by his mother’s side over a year later, and the two were staying in and around the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge.

The pair denned in a hollow willow tree on the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge during the following winter. By now, her cub was a year old, and they were still together. My plan was to dart the female in her den tree in early spring, and replace her Arkansas collar with a new collar that would download GPS coordinates of her position on a daily basis.

As luck would have it, the day I chose to replace her collar was one of the warmest of the spring. As we approached the tree, a quick glance to the right found the female and yearling looking down at us from an adjacent tree. Needless to say, the jig was up.

I wasn’t worried. We could wait until she and the cub came out in a couple of weeks and set traps for her on the refuge. Wrong again. The pair came out later that spring, but did not stay on the refuge. Not even close.

The first call I got was from the Money community north of Greenwood, detailing two bears crossing a soybean field, one of which was wearing an orange collar. She and the yearling then traveled through Malmaison Wildlife Management Area and into a wooded area just south of Holcomb. The pair then took an unexpected north turn and were sighted just below the town of Marks. They then turned due west and were located just off Highway 61 below Clarksdale. I lost track of them after that and assumed they had crossed the river again and were back in Arkansas.

Wrong again. About a week later calls came in about the two bears crossing a field around Stoneville west of Leland. From there the two slowly made their way all the way back down to the Yazoo Refuge. Surely they would stay put this time, right? I should have known better.

The signal disappeared from the refuge but I knew it was just a matter of time before someone saw that orange collar and called it in. Sure enough, a group of biologists working on the Twin Oaks Wildlife Management Area spotted her crossing a road just north of the headquarters. Here we go again, I thought.

The next week a telemetry flight found her in a cornfield on the northern edge of Delta National Forest. This was good news because we knew of at least two males that had been hanging out around that area. Our hope was that she would find herself a “date” and settle in the area. Once again, she would have none of that.

Two weeks later, calls came in reporting she and the yearling on the west side of Lake Washington, and then further north into the Winterville community. As you can imagine, by now I was pretty much at my wits end with these two bears. She had seen the best habitat the delta had to offer but still refused to slow down. I feared that it was only a matter of time before one if not both of them were hit by a car.

Around the time of the Winterville sighting, we had begun baiting and setting a trap for a big male on a 16^th section property in Sharkey County some 50 miles away. We had taken trail camera photos of him and felt confident that we could catch him. On Sunday, August 12, I got the call from Sunflower Wildlife Management Area manager Jason Kerr that we had a bear in the trap, but that it was not the big bear we were expecting. The bear in the trap was wearing an orange collar. All I could do was shake my head in disbelief.

After immobilizing her in the trap, a full exam showed that she was in fine shape despite her marathon journey through the delta. She was given a complete work-up and fitted with a new GPS radio collar that will record her locations on a daily basis for the next two years. My hope is that she will remain on some of the public land in Sharkey County and raise cubs there in the years to come but, of course, I’ve been wrong before.

Below is the map of the 364-mile wanderings of Bear #H910 and her cub in Mississippi over the summer of 2007.

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