LITTLE BELT MOUNTAINS — Grizzly bears and their taste for livestock seem to get a lot of attention when it comes to Montana agriculture. But the Treasure State is also black bear country, and a dedicated team of specialists are spending the summer monitoring their movements and habits in the Little Belt Mountains.
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A day in the office for black bear monitoring specialists in Montana means a hike to "hair corral."
“A hair corral is, roughly, maybe about 60 ft of barbed wire wrapped around a series of 3 to 6 trees at about 19 inches off the ground,” said Colby Anton, the statewide black bear monitoring biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.
This is the third year of studying hair corrals, with previous locations in the Blackfoot River Drainage and west of Kalispell. Corrals are set up after the spring hunting season ends and before the fall archery season begins. Study areas can contain anywhere from 60 to 80 corrals.
Similar to looking for a needle in a haystack, Anton and fellow FWP technicians Daralyn James and Nicole Malay Siegel look for bear hairs on barbed wire.
“They'll (bears) go underneath that barbed wire where we will be able to get a hair sample from them,” said Anton. “From that hair sample, we can then get genetic ID for that animal. And we use that information to develop our population estimates.”
FWP is working on collaboration with a lab at Michigan Tech University to analyze the data.
It's also important to clear DNA from the wire after the hair is collected. The technicians are equipped with small blowtorches to burn off the remaining DNA.
“The next time we come back, if a bear enters or exits at the same point, now we potentially have a sample that has multiple individuals' genetic material,” said Anton
To attract bears, the team will douse a debris pile with fermented blood.
Every two weeks, they also hang a secondary scent above the pile.
“It was fish the last two weeks, now it’s going to be blueberry the next two weeks,” said Anton. “We might switch that up to a smoky bacon flavor next time. The idea being we want those bears to come back again too.”
Each corral is equipped with a remote wilderness camera to track the bears coming and going.
“That'll give us an opportunity at the end of the season to tie individual hair samples to a photo of that animal as they enter or exit the corral,” said Anton.
Another key aspect of bear monitoring is placing GPS radio collars on bears, providing important insight from habitat selection to how the animals use the landscape.
“The other really valuable aspect that we get from GPS collars is being able to monitor an individual's survival and cause specific mortality over time. We can do that across, age and sex classes of bears,” said Anton.
Anton says technicians are already doing some black bear collaring in the Gravelly Mountains, which will be the focus of next year’s hair corral study area.
He adds that the program is not unique to Montana and is practiced throughout the country. Anton says the current method is modeled after Montana’s mountain lion monitoring program.
Through modern technology, some hardware store supplies and a hint of nature to study one of the wild’s most intriguing creatures.
“This is the best way to get black bear genetic samples without having to touch them,” said Anton.
Anton, whose first wildlife job was black bear management in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, says he’s always been interested in large carnivore ecology. He says one of the most interesting things about working with black bears in Montana is the variety of animals.
“We get to see all the different color phases of black bears,” said Anton. “So, we have blond black bears, black black bears, brown cinnamon, and combinations of all those colors.”
Anton says occasionally, curious hikers will come across the hair corrals.
“When we set up our hair corrals, we, we put up a series of warning signs, anywhere from about 80 to 100 meters out,” said Anton. “The warning signs have my phone number on them with a warning that there is a potential for increased bear activity at these hair corrals.”
Anton says black bears don’t present the same danger to agriculture as grizzly bears.
“In general, we don't think of black bears necessarily being a predatory issue on livestock, with the exception of chickens,” said Anton.
Anton says over 90% of a black bear’sdiet is going to come from grasses, berries, roots, and insects.
“They will, during the spring season, go after deer fawns and elk neonates. That's their kind of primary time to start getting some meat resource. And then they'll also go after hunter gut piles in the fall,” said Anton.
