An ongoing study of Massachusetts black bears, which are slowly expanding their territories eastward, has shown they can travel substantial distances in search of food, especially in the fall as they seek to pack on the calories for winter hibernation.
“Their entire lifestyle, everything about them, is adapted to gaining all the calories they need and all the weight they need to survive that period without food,” said David Wattles, black bear and furbearer biologist for the state Department of Fisheries and Wildlife.
Wattles said female bears, equipped with GPS collars and accompanied by their cubs, were tracked in the fall of 2017 traveling from central Massachusetts to southern Vermont and New Hampshire for stays of a month or so before returning to their home territories to den for the winter.
Wattles and his colleagues believe the bears went north in response to gypsy moth infestations which decimated oak trees and therefore a favorite food, acorns. Beechnuts, another bear staple, were bountiful that year north of the Massachusetts line.
How did the hungry bears know the beechnuts were there? Wattles is not entirely sure. The bears may have been drawn by their incredibly acute sense of smell. Or maybe they just kept moving until they found a reliable source of food to bulk up for the winter.
Some of the bears made the loop twice that fall, said Wattles. “They went up, returned, went back up and came back,” he said.
Last fall, a female and her three cubs left their home territory in the southeast area of the Quabbin Reservoir and headed south, where they raided residential bird feeders in the suburbs of Hartford for a short time. Then they headed back home to their winter den.
That remarkable journey — 45 miles each way as the crow flies, but far longer for earthbound bears — included crossings of both the Massachusetts Turnpike and Interstate 84.
Wattles discusses some of these findings, along with the work that he and his colleagues have been doing, in a recently released video put out by MassWildlife called “Living and Working with Bears.”
The approximately seven-minute video, which MassWildlife aired on its Facebook page last week, will eventually be followed by additional pieces on living with bears and the work of other MassWildlife biologists and the animals they are studying, Wattles said.
MassWildlife is tracking 38 bears from the New York State line to Worcester County, home to the Quabbin Reservoir, which offers some of the most pristine wilderness in the state. Some of the more advanced GPS collars used by the researchers are capable of taking a bear’s location every 45 minutes.
As of this spring, all of the collared bears are female, in part because the decades-long bear study is working toward a better understanding of breeding patterns and population densities. Females, known as sows, provide the most information toward that end.
Males, or boars, are notoriously difficult to collar because, unlike the females, their necks tend to be thicker than their heads, Wattles said. The wide-ranging boars, once collared, tend to shed them pretty fast.
MassWildlife’s most recent bear count, conducted in 2011, indicated there were approximately 4,500 bears statewide. Today, if anticipated growth rates have held true, that number likely stands around 5,500, Wattles said.
This year, Wattles and his colleagues plan to utilize a snare designed to harmlessly capture hair samples from bears. DNA gleaned from those hairs will help them better estimate the bear population statewide and understand how their DNA flows across the landscape. As well as what natural or man-made barriers impede that flow.
Although most Massachusetts bears, descendants of a residual population that radiated from the northern Berkshires, live west of the Connecticut River, Wattles said bear populations are steadily increasing to the east of it. At some point, he said, the number of eastern bears will surpass their western cousins.
One young male quite famously made it all the way to Cape Cod in 2012. That wayward bear was captured and relocated to central Massachusetts.
“Two-thirds of Massachusetts, and growing, is now bear country,” Wattles said. “We need the public to acknowledge that fact.”
The Connecticut River, and even wider bodies of water, present no impediment to bears on the move. Some of the Worcester County bears, instead of heading north prior to hibernation, have instead gone west, crossing the river for short stays in Western Massachusetts, Wattles said.
Food of course, isn’t the only things that drives bears to move. In the spring of 2017, as mating season got underway, a collared male, presumably seeking females, was tracked swimming south from the tip of the Quabbin Reservoir’s Prescott Peninsula in New Salem to the forested shoreline in Ware, and vice-versa, seven times. That’s about a half-mile of open water.
The study, which began in 1980 with conventional radio collars, has also shown that bears have adapted to living near dense population centers by making use of small patches of habitat — woodland and wetland areas — as they move. Wattles said bears can learn the traffic patterns of major roadways and even highways to better get around their territories — sometimes using culverts to cross under the traffic.
“They are highly adapted to living amongst us and they are very smart,” Wattles said. Smart as they are, however, bear-vehicle collisions are not unusual.
Because the study has been going on for so long, nearly 40 years, Wattles and his colleagues have been able to monitor generations of bears in some areas. Wattles touches on the value of that generational data in the video:
“We have long lineages of bears in some of these areas that we’ve captured, sows and then, you know, their great-great-great-great granddaughters, that we have folded into the collaring studies,” he said.
Wattles stressed his key message when discussing how people can safely co-exist with bears is to eliminate their food sources, especially bird feeders.
“In reality, bird feeders are the main cause of human-wildlife conflict,” Wattles said. “It trains animals to spend time in the neighborhoods.”
Other wild animals, including coyotes, are drawn to bird feeders as well. While coyotes are known to eat birdseed, they are probably even more attracted to the small rodents known to frequent feeders.
The prevalence of winter-time bird feeders encourages some Western Massachusetts bears to skip hibernation altogether. Two years ago, two yearling cubs were fatally shot in Belchertown after they, along with their mother, grew dependent on feeders and remained active all winter long, Wattles said. A number of bears in the Northampton area are also active all winter due to bird feeders.
Bears are also prone to raiding backyard chicken coops and beehives. MassWildlife recommends the use of electric fencing to discourage bears from doing so. The agency offers this online advice for those who keep bees or chickens:
“Teach bears about electric fences by placing bacon strips or foil strips with peanut butter or honey on the hot wires of the fence. This delivers a shock to the most sensitive part of a bear, its nose.”
Wattles discusses bear hunting near the close of the video and describes it as an “essential tool” for wildlife managers to manage the bear population. Wattles said he does not personally hunt bears. Instead he prefers to photograph them. He stresses, however, that the two activities are not mutually exclusive and that MassWildlife is dedicated to ensuring that there are plenty of bears on the landscape for both.
“Our agency strives to ensure that these species will be around in perpetuity,” Wattles said. “It’s very important to us to ensure that that happens so that we don’t have to have that conversation with our grandchildren that I used to do work on bears but they’re not here anymore,” Wattles said.
“Living and Working with Bears” was produced by Jesse St. Andre, a hunter education specialist for MassWildlife who shot most of the video as well. It also includes video taken by the late Bill Byrne, a longtime photographer and videographer for MassWildlife who passed away unexpectedly last May.