Bear Chaser, not Beer Chaser (Andre)

For some of you who might know me, in my past, I was more likely to be chasing beer, particularly good beer, rather than chasing bear, the 4-legged and furry kind. Well, that has changed some here…..

Big Bend has a fairly stable Mexican Black bear population of 15-25 bears. Mexican Black bears, as the name suggests, have migrated into the park from across the river in Mexico. In the early 1900s there was a native bear population in the area, but they were wiped out by the impact of ranching and hunting which were staples in the area prior to Big Bend becoming a national park in 1944. It was not until the mid-1980s that the bears started to return to Big Bend.

As we have learned, sows (mother bears) and their new cubs emerge from their dens in February. (Big Bend bears do not fully hibernate since there are not deep freezes here in the winter, they just kind of take it slow!) As they emerge from their dens, the mothers and cubs are pretty active as they look for food and the cubs learn and explore their surroundings.

Well, just down the road from our visitor center is an area where bears have been very active. So active, as you will see from the picture below, that the park has installed warning signs in the road where they have been crossing and seen, multiple times a day!

Bears Crossing at Wildlife Crossing Sign

Which brings us to ‘bear chasing.’ Last week, a mother with 2 cubs (the other active mother has 3 cubs) decided she wanted to hang around our visitor center. (The visitor center is 1 mile from the bear crossing signs.) We tried to scare her away but to no avail. (This is clearly not good for the bears as they need to be afraid of people and learn to keep their distance.) Eventually the bears circled around the back parking area in the basin but then were spotted by park visitors. This created as you might imagine a crowd of lookers and picture takers.

Our job was to get between and stay between the bears and the crowds to keep the bears and the visitors safe from each other. After a while, 10 minutes or so, the mother got spooked and headed up the hill into the woods – unfortunately only one cub followed, the other climbed a tree! So, our job became to disperse the crowd so the mother might come back and rescue the cub, which is exactly what happened. Of course, after the cub literally was crying and making squeaking-like noises hoping for help!

It was the next day when I made the connection between beer chaser and bear chaser. I was alone in the visitor center and got a call from a park ranger that there was a report of the mother and 2 cubs again just down the road from the visitor center. The request from the ranger was, can you go take a look and if they are there, try to scare them off before a crowd gathers again. As I was walking toward the area where the bears were reported, I was thinking, this is a rather large turn of events in a short amount of time – my job was not to run from bears, but run to them!

You may be wondering, were the bears there? No they were not! So, I walked back pondering the turn of events. But there is still more to this story …..

Later that afternoon, I was still alone in the visitor center, and in walked a visitor who asked if I knew there was a bear and 2 cubs right behind the visitor center! I quickly ran out the back door, and sure enough, there they were – about 30-40 yard from the building, just on the edge of the parking lot in the brush. I jumped, yelled, stamped, but they just looked at me disinterestedly and would not move. Not wanting a repeat of the previous day, I jumped in the park car, drove at bears, and started beeping the horn!

Well, and I have told this story to a few people already, in a rather stark instance of what appeared to me to be natural selection right before my eyes, the mother and one cub ran off into the woods – the other cub, presumably the same one as the day before, climbed up a tree! I quickly back-up the car and fortunately, or possibly just putting off the inevitable, the mother returned for the cub and off all three went into the woods!

Since that day, and it has been more than a week, the bears up here have been rather quiet. We still get a report every day or so, sometimes more than one, but nothing that required us to chase them bears!