Black bears in the wild: NREM conducts black bear research in Oklahoma's Panhandle

Black bears in the wild: NREM conducts black bear research in Oklahoma's Panhandle

Friday, December 13, 2024

Media Contact: Sophia Fahleson | Digital Communications Specialist | 405-744-7063 | [email protected]

Reports of black bear sightings started to increase in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, during the 2000s and 2010s.

Was the black bear population increasing in the state's Panhandle?

Biologists received reports of black bear sightings from community members, and private landowners reported bears destroying crops, said Kurt Kuklinski, wildlife diversity and research supervisor at the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.

"That was the precursor to the ODWC deciding to dedicate funding for a research project to address it," Kuklinski said.

Every year, the ODWC chooses problems they need to research, creates a request for proposals announcement, and sends the announcement to research experts.

In 2020, Robert Lonsinger, Oklahoma Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit assistant unit leader, and Sue Fairbanks, natural resource ecology and management associate professor, submitted a black bear research proposal.

"Lonsinger and Fairbanks laid out a pretty solid project concept that we felt would answer some of our questions," Kuklinski said.

The ODWC funded the OSU proposal. The total grant cost was more than $250,000 and was split between the ODWC and OSU. The ODWC provided 75% of the cost from federal grant funds. OSU provided 25% of the cost.

The research took place from January 2022 through June 2024. The field work occurred from May to August in 2022 and in 2023.

"The study started with camera traps because we did not know if we would even see any bears, but we started to see them immediately," Fairbanks said. "When a bear was detected on camera, we set up hair snares in that area."

Hair snares are a barbed wire fence around a scent station that collects hair samples of bears to provide genetic material. The scent stations varied with four types of scents, including blueberry extract, skunk, beaver castor and anise oil, Fairbanks said.

"My advisers - Dr. Lonsinger and Dr. Fairbanks - initially proposed the camera trapping and hair snare work because it is non-invasive," said Bailey Kleeberg, who led this research project and earned her master's degree in natural resource ecology and management in 2024.

"Every single day, we were going out, meeting with landowners, putting out cameras, and checking cameras," Kleeberg said. "The way my study was set up, if we saw a bear on a camera, we would put up a hair snare."

The team would install up to five hair snares immediately following a black bear detection on a camera, Kleeberg added.

The number of hair snares was dependent on landowner permission, she added.

The DNA from the hair sample provided enough genetic material to verify the black bears in Oklahoma are genetically similar to black bears in northeast New Mexico and southeast Colorado, Kuklinski said.

This information confirmed ODWC's suspicions Oklahoma bears likely immigrated from New Mexico or Colorado, Kuklinski added.

The genetic material also allowed Kleeberg to create a population estimate of 26 bears, she said.

"The team got pictures of two different females with two cubs each," Kleeberg said.

The camera traps also indicated bears were staying in lower elevation, riparian areas of the Black Mesa area, away from people, Fairbanks said.

"Our next step internally is monitoring the bear population out there," Kuklinski said. "We need to see if that population is stable or if it is continuing to grow.

"One of the first things we have to do is to educate the public, the landowners, and the people who live out there and would frequently encounter these bears," Kuklinski said. "The states with bear populations often utilize Bear Wise training to educate the public."

The public should be aware bears are in Oklahoma, but the ODWC needs to educate people that they can co-exist with the bears and how to navigate that, Kuklinski added.

Story by Kayli Vavricek | Cowboy Journal

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