Big Bend: El Despoblado, or “the uninhabited land.”
“A carpet of interacting plants and animals deftly woven on a geologic loom.” Frederick Gehlbach, Mountain Islands, Desert Seas: A Natural History of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands.
Big Bend National Park is one of the largest and least-visited national parks in the country. It encompasses 800,000 acres and an entire mountain range (the Chisos) that reaches elevations of up to 8000 feet. The Chihuahuan Desert harbors almost 25 percent of the world’s cactus species, and the World Wildlife Fund gives it third place in overall desert species diversity. Lots of land, high level of diversity, sky islands of subalpine habitat, few people...sounds like a good place for a bear to live.
In 2000, I wrote a piece for Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine about the bears coming back to Big Bend NP, and much of that story has found its way into this chapter, which also includes updates from a sidebar to a story on East Texas bears in the same magazine published in February 2006 and from a recent peer-reviewed publication.
As I researched the piece and visited the park, talking to the people there who worked day in and day out with bears, I became even more enamored of the idea that bears would come back to stay. I envisioned an idyllic scene where people adopted laid-back attitudes about the bears, allowing a live-and-let-live feeling to overtake the acrimony of earlier times. But as it turns out, the people aren’t the problem, nature is. I had forgotten that our best laid plans can be swept off the table by the unpredictable caprice of a nature we still struggle to understand. The edifice stands, but whether or not the bears will adorn it remains to be seen, even several years after I visited the park for that first interview about the bears.
Before all this worry about who was at fault, the clear enemy of the bear was man. Bears in the Big Bend had a bad reputation in the early 1900s. In 1937, a black bear allegedly stampeded 19 goats over a 3,000-foot cliff in what would one day become the national park. It was unfortunate timing for the bear because the National Park Service (NPS) had just convinced the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to add the black bear to its protected game animal list. When newspapers reported the “Goat Tragedy,” the Park Service regretted that the story had been given to the press since it “will not be appreciated by local ranchmen.”
In the thirties and forties, black bears and other predators—including coyotes, bobcats, and golden eagles—were hunted for sport and much despised among local ranchers, except when they served as tourist attractions. One Marathon saloon, open in 1910, kept a pet bear so customers would buy it a beer. Apparently, the only bears allowed to live in those rough days were the pet bears—at least until they became too “cross.”
Some idea of conservation—and allowing wild bears to live, too—arose within a few decades. One suggestion was to create areas as refuge for bears—its primary feature would be that sheep would be excluded. The establishment of Big Bend NP accomplished this to some extent, but advocates suggested further preservation in areas outside the park where bears still lived.
The birth of the national park began in 1935 when legislation to create Big Bend NP was passed, but it wasn’t until June 1944 that the NPS took over its 27th national park. In the interim, a great deal of preserved natural history was lost forever when a fire destroyed the museum in the Basin, incinerating hundreds of locally collected specimens, leaving to the imagination any possibility that grizzly specimens may have been among them.
By the time Big Bend NP was established in 1944, few resident bears remained in the area. Biological surveys did a good job of documenting the organisms still in the park, and heavy land use during 1942–1944 coupled with several severe drought years totally wiped out any remaining bear population in the area. Shooting and trapping by ranchers, hunters, and federal predator control agents had also decimated the population, and habitat lost to development may have provided the coup de grace. Despite the notable absence, rumors abounded in the 1950s that the park service was secretly importing bears into the park, but the rumors had no basis and probably sprang from the hostility local ranchers felt for the park service, which has yet to import any bears to any part of Texas.
The bears started to import themselves back into the park in the 1980s. The preceding decades saw only the occasional individual bear—usually male—making its way across the border from Mexico. But sightings became common enough that at as the 1980s faded into the 1990s, the park had its first “bear jam” or traffic backup (example at left) because of a bear sighting.
Today, the park has an established population of black bears, but their existence remains tenuous. The park service must manage the people–bear relationship, and the forces of nature remain potential threats to the population’s stability.
One force of nature that seems to guide so much of how animals interact is hunger. In my original article, I described a story related to me by bear biologist and then-graduate student Dave Onorato: Hunger drove Candy the bear from the mountains of northern Mexico, spurred her across huge stretches of uncharitable desert, compelled her to swim the Rio Grande, and pushed her across more rugged ground before she finally reached the promised land of the Chisos Basin in the Big Bend. One day in the 1984, she did what no other female Mexican black bear had done in 50 years. She made the Big Bend her home.
Eventually, fanciful humans named her Candy, although scientifically, she was known as Bear #7.
Onorato, one of a handful of serious bear researchers monitoring bear activity in Texas, was a doctoral student in 2000, earning his Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University, but doing his work in Big Bend NP and surrounding areas. Candy, he told me, was the matriarch of the Big Bend population. When I went to talk to him, it was one of his few days off, and I had interrupted a rare visit from his father, but he graciously served as my guide to all things bear in Big Bend.
The day we took our tour, viewing a bear trap (general ex., right) and observing his use of locator devices, was not your typical Big Bend early October day. Fog and mist lingered long into the late afternoon, obscuring the deep blues and soft sandstone reds of the mountains. It was freezing cold, a harbinger of the storm that would lock the desert country in snow and ice that evening. Onorato took me in his truck to a trap site and explained to me the various attractants used to lure the bears into the traps. These traps were simply for capture and release, and the baits were harmless fish-scented lures; things had changed a lot since the days of deadly snares, self-triggered shotguns, and strychnine-laced snacks.
He told me what they knew at the time about Candy. She arrived in Big Bend in 1984 and began to reproduce in 1988, a banner year because a reproducing female means the population may take root. But the story wasn’t all happy news at the time based on Onorato’s genetic analyses, although the outlook has since improved as more genetic results have come in.
Onorato’s work with the bears originally indicated that Candy (a.k.a., Bear #7) was the Mother of All Big Bend Bears, having contributed her genes to much of the local population. If most of the population were that closely related, there would probably be very little genetic variation among the bears in Big Bend. That kind of relatedness would be similar to a single family’s founding a population on an island where cousins mated with cousins over and over again. The stage in this situation is set for two possible negative effects: interbreeding can result in the surfacing of hidden disorders, and any change—such as the introduction of a new disease—that affects one bear adversely may affect them all that way.
Onoroto’s initial work focused on the DNA found in the bear’s mitochondria, the “powerhouse” organelles of the cell that maintain their own genes and make their own proteins and build most of the cell’s energy-containing molecules. These organelles pass only from mother to offspring, so genetic analyses of mitochondrial DNA tell us about the female lineage.
We expect scientists to be dry and detached in their work, but Onorato had named his bears: Candy, Little Mama, Trixi, Vixen. On the day I visited, we listened on his locator for Hershey’s signal. Hershey was a small yearling male who, at 40 pounds, was about 20 pounds underweight for that time of year, not a good indicator for his survival. As we listened for Hershey and hear his beep, I felt a little buzz of excitement. There were real live bears out there.
The return of the bears sends a frisson of excitement through amateurs and experts. Before the advent of Bear #7, the conspicuous absence of black bears in West Texas engraved itself as a permanent fact in the minds of residents and visitors alike. Bear #7 and the comeback bears that followed surprised west Texans and the National Park Service. Many of us Texans had learned that in Big Bend, bears had gone the way of the wolf. When a friend of mine, known for his tall tales, claimed to have seen a black bear in Big Bend National Park in 1988, I secretly dismissed his story as an exaggerated javelina (left) sighting, even as he described taking a picture and depicted the park service’s excitement about his encounter. But these days, a yellow sign with a bear silhouette warns of a new presence in the park, unmistakable evidence that the bears are indeed back. If that’s not confirmation enough, the bear lockers at the Basin campgrounds should be. The question is, will the bears be able to stay?
The people probably won’t get in their way this time. Raymond Skiles, Big Bend NP wildlife biologist, told me that as the comeback bears have changed attitudes about living in the Big Bend area, the people in the area have changed their attitudes about the bears. “We’ve seen a different feeling of more welcome from society since the bears came back,” he said, “especially compared to what we find in the records from the turn of the century.”
It’s a different Texas from the one the bears left behind decades ago. “There’s a lot of optimism as the bears recolonize west Texas,” Skiles said at the time. “Now we would like to live with them. They enrich our lives, and landowners are willing to consider strategies for managing livestock with bears.” What if bears do become a problem? “Landowners will always have to have some options for dealing with individuals that aren’t compatible,” he says, “but for all parties concerned, we have the attitude that we can get along.”
One thing that may help spur ranchers to alter their attitudes is an alteration in the nature of their livestock. Up to the 1950s, sheep were the mainstay of West Texas, providing wool for war and peace. But by the fifties, the need for wool receded, and a drop in demand combined with drought led ranchers to abandon wool as a commodity. This change set the stage for the bears to return, and allowed to their return to be more welcoming than worrisome for ranchers.
This return of the bear is actually an unusual event in the history of wildlife—animals usually are not successful at recolonizing unless humans step in to help. In the case of the Big Bend bears, however, human intervention has not been necessary; the real key has been a lack of human meddling. In addition to a return to the Big Bend NP area, bears also are setting up territory in the nearby Black Gap Wildlife Management Area, where Courthouse Bear was deposited after his removal from downtown Alpine. Where else might the bear find resources in West Texas? Some possibilities include the Davis, Del Norte, and Glass mountain ranges north of the Chisos. Other potential recolonization sites to watch are the Chinati and Housetop mountains near Amistad National Recreational Area.
What made the bears such a success if humans aren’t responsible? A lucky confluence of factors from the ecological to the sociological made the return a reality. The comeback took a long time, beginning with very occasional sightings in the fifties that increased in frequency in the 1980s. Bears seemed to favor the Chisos Basin area of Big Bend NP, which is much like habitat black bears enjoy in central Arizona. All it took for the population to get its tenuous paw-hold was Candy the female bear making her arduous trek across the mountains and desert—possibly along with a few other members of her population.
Before Candy, sightings in Big Bend NP excited visitors and residents and attracted as much media attention as the arrival of a movie star or a presidential misstep. In 1969, a visitor, Bill Rabenstein, took a picture of a bear near Hot Springs in the park. In 1977, a naturalist and lover of the park wrote of finding fresh scat and overturned stumps and rocks in Juniper Canyon, undeniable evidence a bear had entered the neighborhood. At first, all bear sightings were probably wandering males—up to the 1960s, at least, when several yearling males met their deaths on a ranch northeast of the park. The young bears had probably wandered in from one of the bear reservoirs in northern Mexico, possibly the Sierra del Carmens.
The first sow with cubs sighting occurred in 1978, but it was unverified. By 1988, park employees had recorded 26 sightings, and in the following 10 years, 2,127 observations entered the record. Many of these sightings included females with cubs, the hallmark of permanence in the world of bears. The year 1994 had more than 400 bear sightings within the park.
Not every sighting ended simply in a report and an undisturbed bear. Sightings outside protected lands, even of this protected animal, could end in tragedy, as occurred when the small male lost his life on Sul Ross Hill after causing a stir on the Alpine golf course. In spite of this solemn footnote, by 1997, the bear population in Big Bend had reached about 20 bears, which roamed the canyons and the basin, dining on prickly pear and madrone (right)and acorns. It looked like humans and bears had reached a pretty easy truce. The bears’ preferred habitat might make that truce a little easier to honor. Their best food sources lie in the protection of the park, and the population centers within the park’s boundaries. But how long the bears will stay put in Big Bend is another story.
Onorato told me the early version of the story as I followed him to the bear trap on that unseasonably frigid October morning in Big Bend. Just the week before, highs had hit 100 in nearby Lajitas. “This year, they’ve begun a fall migration,” Onorato said about the bears as we made our way through low-hanging tree limbs and lingering mist. “They’re taking long fall journeys starting around mid-August, and they’re expected to return in mid-November to the natal site. The question is whether or not they’ll come back.” He hoped they would but already he knew that four collared bears had died in Mexico where bears are protected in some areas, but not in others. The year after this trip, I found out that the population had suffered even more losses, threatening the success of the recolonization.
The fall migration caused the population of bears in the Big Bend area to shift in 2000. Estimates early in the year put the number of bears at about 25, but by November, that estimate dropped to 10 or 15. Females trekked back to northern Mexico, covering the kind of acreage usually reserved for the more enterprising males. “One female has migrated 100 kilometers (60 miles),” Onorato told me, “and that’s very far for a female. Usually, 15 to 20 kilometers is a long way for them to go.” The unusual length of these treks did not bode well for the West Texas population, although it was a sign of movement—and the potential for gene movement—between the populations.
Why did the bears leave? Food. Nature seemed unaware of the truce between humans and bears that would smooth the way for bear recolonization. Nature’s representatives in the form of drought and a little caterpillar may have conspired to drive the bears southward, back into Mexico. For two consecutive years, the leaf oakworm caterpillar had decimated oaks in key habitat, depriving the bears of their favorite acorns. Drought decreased other forage, including the juniper and madrone berries the bears particularly target.
As we hiked to a bear trap just off the Basin road, Onorato pointed out the madrones to me. The deep red bark stood out against green leaves, but it was true—no berries were in sight. According to Skiles, when acorns drop, the bears’ failsafe are madrone berries. Without those, the bears must move elsewhere for food or they will starve. Heading southward to Mexico is their way of avoiding starvation. It is just another of Nature’s ironies; the bears probably came from Mexico in the first place because of food shortages that resulted from overpopulation and fires in the Sierra del Carmens.
National Park officials believe that the bear population in the park, which had dropped to no more than 15 female black bears by 2006, might have been on the rise again as the drought-induced conditions finally reversed in the area. Nevertheless, as the vagaries of nature consistently demonstrate, there are no guarantees for these bears, and Texas is now in the midst of a historic drought (left) that will have long-term outcomes for people, bears, and every other living thing in the state.
It’s exciting anyway just to be in a place where bears live. The evening before my tour to the bear trap, a small bear had appeared outside the lodge dining hall, drawing diners from their food to watch him through the window. But the little male was breaking the rules and should not have been so close to civilization. While the park service likes to say that there are no problem bears, only problem people, achieving a balance in a park between the people and the bears can still require a certain amount of finessing of animals intent on becoming a problem.
Luckily, the park has had only a handful of cases where bears entered a campsite in search of food, and Raymond Skiles wants it to stay that way. So far, there have been no serious human–bear encounters in Big Bend NP. Skiles feels that the park staff have an advantage other parks have not had in the past because it was able to manage an animal population before it was even established. “When the bear population started to grow, we decided we wanted to be the first national park in the country to implement cutting-edge technology before we had a problem,” Skiles told me.
The park service has a history of doing things wrong when it came to bears—pictures of grizzlies dining at the garbage dumps in Yellowstone presaged the park’s bear-management difficulties. “The visitors who watched the bears at the garbage dumps didn’t see the aftermath of the ones who got so aggressive that the rangers had to kill them,” Skiles says. “These parks had to go through a painful process to separate people and bears, and they could tell us what we needed to do so we didn’t reinvent the wheel. But no one had ever done this before the problem started.”
What worked in other parks often would not work in Big Bend NP, however, according to Skiles. Bears can’t be relocated easily if they became a problem because the Chisos Basin area is pretty much the only bear habitat available in the park. Destroying renegade bears in such a small population could be devastating—the destruction of even one bear could mean a loss of a significant percentage of the park population. Big Bend NP rangers handled the situation a different way, dealing with potential problems before they happened through education and bear-proofing, much in the way parents keep toddlers out of trouble by locking cabinets and drawers and keeping a constant watch on their activity. Humans had evolved from enemy to nurturer in the world of the bear.
Education is the main ingredient in the nurturing attitude. “We want to teach people how to visit the park without having conflict with the bears,” Skiles told me. Visitors get an eyeful of bear information in every visitor center and in every brochure they see. The park newspaper features a two-page spread on bears, giving advice on how to live safely with wild animals and providing visitors with updates on bear research. The park even offers a special brochure on the return of the black bear.
In addition to education, the park service focused on staff training, research, and facilities that discourage bear-people contact as paramount in keeping the bears wild. Skiles explained: “We train staff to capture and move bears humanely and safely, we’ve changed our waste management from open-top trashcans to bear-proof dumpsters, and we’re using research to develop a scientific basis for our management actions. Our goal is to have a bear population that is wild and is not influenced by human activity.”
Only once have these well-laid management plans gone awry. “We have had one occasion to relocate a bear,” Skiles related. “It was an orphan bear that found a great food source—acorns in a tree near cabins in the park. It was up a tree, drawing a heck of a crowd. People started showing up with picnic baskets, and the fear was that people might feed the bear. So we relocated it to another drainage nearby, hoping it would find another tree. It wasn’t really a problem bear, and the solution seems to have worked.” The picnic baskets brought on shades of Yellowstone NP, where visitors once set up in stands around garbage dumps to watch grizzlies dine. A huge drawback of this entertainment was that grizzlies ceased to fear people and began to associate them with food, making Yellowstone grizzlies among the most dangerous bears in any national park. Staff at Big Bend wanted to avoid just such a situation, and to date, have had great success.
But success is not guaranteed even with all of the careful efforts of the park service. The close of the 20th century saw the loss of one of the park’s most famous bears—Little Mama—and her cubs. Newspaper stories about bears in the park had featured Little Mama’s picture, and she was something of a celebrity. “They died in September (2000),” Onorato said, shaking his head. “She died in the desert in a wash, and there were cub prints behind her. We suspect dehydration.” It’s difficult to maintain detachment with so much invested in a feeble grip on future success.
And success remains important. Little Mama and her kind are considered by some bear experts to be members of a keystone species, anchoring the ecosystem of an area. If they disappear, the ecosystem gets out of whack, and nature’s edifice is undermined. Without the bears, the balance of the system shifts inappropriately—anyone who lives with an urban deer population knows how important a predator population can be; without predators, deer populations increase exponentially and decimate local resources. All the organisms in an equilibrated ecosystem have evolved and existed together in a finely tuned association, providing checks and balances for each other. The removal of a cornerstone like the bear can cause the entire edifice to collapse. Bears are much more than an adornment in Big Bend.
“Black bears eat mostly vegetation, but they are also top predators,” Skiles informed me, “and they have a big effect on the vegetation community and what is growing where. Their return has made a big step forward.”
One step forward, sometimes two steps back. Onorato’s work with the mitochondrial DNA indicated initially that the bears do have close genetic relationships, a fragility in the population not evident to the naked eye. Park officials worried about the lack of genetic variation. “We want to get a handle on what the genetic integrity of this population is so we’ll know if the population is diverse enough to sustain itself,” Skiles said at the time. “Our outlook is positive, but guarded.”
Since my discussion with Skiles, more information about bear genetics in the park has emerged, the most recent published in 2007. In that year, Onorato and colleagues reported in the journal Conservation Genetics that genetic analyses of the Big Bend and north Mexico “metapopulation” revealed a more-promising level of genetic diversity than previously thought. They applied a kind of different kind of genetic analysis in later studies and gained a more complete picture of bear genetics in the south/southwest Texas borderlands.
There is gene flow between the populations, a process in which mating among individuals of different groups keeps genes “flowing” between the groups, potentially keeping levels of genetic diversity higher in a given population. Bears move from northern Mexico and mate with bears in the Texas populations, and bears from the populations in Texas travel to Mexico and mate.
The authors conclude that maintaining this flow is important for the Texas–Mexico borderland bear populations, a key factor in conserving bears in the region. They also observe that it is the relatively “uncommon event” of long-range, female dispersal—a female moving from one place to another over a significant distance, as Candy did—that seems to drive and maintain the diversity of the metapopulation. Interestingly, the authors see hints that a population of bears in the Mogollon Mountains in New Mexico, northwest of Big Bend, may be candidates for classification as another subspecies, based on the results of their analyses. Bears in the Mogollons show little evidence of gene flow between this New Mexico population and bears in Texas.
Skiles made his statement to me about the “positive but guarded” outlook for the bears in 2000. Things can change a lot in just a few years, thanks to the unpredictability of nature. In 2006, he told Joe Nick Patoski that “The population isn’t safe and secure here. It’s a very tenuous existence.” Onorato and colleagues describe the West Texas bear populations as “potentially ephemeral,” and the extreme drought and recent fires in Texas (left, smoke over the Davis Mountains) is disrupting any path to success they may have been treading. Thus, for the black bears of West Texas, the outlook remains tenuously, ephemerally “positive, but guarded.”
References
Airhart, Mark. 2000. Big Bend: Desert Frontier. Earth & Sky Radio Series, September.
Black Bear Update. 1996. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Online document: http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/landwater/land/habitats/trans_pecos/nongame/blackbear/.
Borderland Comeback. 2002. Geographica. National Geographic Magazine, December.
Cox, Mike Cox. 1996. The Grizzly Bear in the Southwest (Book Review). Lone Star Junction, August.
Garner, Nathan, personal communication
Gehlbach, Frederick R. 1993. Mountain Islands and Desert Seas: A Natural History of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands (The Louise Merrick Natural Environment, No 15) Texas A&M University Press: Bryan, TX.
Jameson, John R. 1945. Big Bend National Park: The Formative Years. TX Western Press: The University of Texas, El Paso.
Jameson, John R. 1996. The Story of Big Bend National Park. Austin.
Langford, J.O, with Gipson, F. 1955. Big Bend: A Homesteader’s Story. UT Press: Austin.
The Mammals of Texas Online Edition. http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot1/. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Onorato, David P. and Hellgren, Eric C. 2001. Black Bear at the Border: Natural Recolonization of the Trans-Pecos. In Large Mammal Restoration: Ecological and Sociological Challenges in the 21st Century. Maehr, David S., Noss, Reed F., and Larkin, Jeffery L., Eds. Island Press: Washington, D.C.
Onorato, D. P., E. C. Hellgren, R. A. Van Den Bussche, D. L. Doan-Crider, and J. R. Skiles Jr. 2007. Genetic structure of American black bears in the desert Southwest of North America: Conservation implications for recolonization. Conservation Genetics.
Patoski, Joe Nick. 2006. “Back in black: with or without a stocking program, the black bear is returning to East Texas.” Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine, February.
Skiles, Raymond, personal communication.
Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission. 1945. Principal Game Birds and Mammals of Texas: Their Distribution and Management. Press of Von Boeckmann-Jones:Austin.
Tyler, Ronnie C. 1975. The Big Bend: a History of the Last Texas Frontier. National Park Service: US Dept of Interior, Washington, D.C.
Wauer, Roland H. 1997. For All Seasons, a Big Bend Journal. UT Press: Austin.
Willingham, Emily. 2001. Return of the Bears. Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine, August. pp. 46-51.
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Note: There's one chapter left. For the handful who've been reading the book, my appreciation, and I hope you derived some enjoyment from it. For those who'd rather see regular old blog posts again, I've got a growing list of topics and will forge ahead with those after posting the final chapter of The Bears of Texas. Either way, thanks for stopping by.
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The complete book, When Worlds Collide: The Troubled History of Bears and People in Texas, is now available as a Kindle download on Amazon. Thanks for reading.
