Researchers learning more about Asheville's bears

ASHEVILLE - Last spring and summer, researchers tracked a black bear that traveled from Asheville to portions of Graham County, likely crossing roads and moving through populated areas along the 80-mile trek.

But the bear didn’t stay put. He turned around and headed back to Asheville, according to wildlife biologist Mike Carraway.

The round trip took several months.

“He just took off and explored other territory and decided that he liked Asheville better and came back,” Carraway said.

The young bear was fitted with a GPS collar as part of a five-year study aimed at finding out more about urban and suburban bear populations in and around Asheville.

The study is a joint effort between the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and N.C. State University, and it is in its second year.

For the first three years, researchers will focus on field work, fitting bears with collars to track their movements and checking up on bears in their dens during the winter. The final two years they will continue to monitor the collared bears and analyze the data.

The study aims to shed more light on causes of mortality, cub survival and reproductive rates of urban and suburban bears as well as looking at their movements and the corridors the animals use for travel.

“Anecdotally, what we see is they pretty much stick to ridge tops and patches of woods,” said Nick Gould, field coordinator for the study and a Ph.D. student at N.C. State. “They’re still doing what bears do. They are just navigating small developments, communities, neighborhoods, and sometimes obviously using those.”

Identifying bear corridors could help wildlife officials preserve them, Gould said.

The $500,000 study is the first of its kind in the Southeast, and the hope is what biologists learn will help them make recommendations for managing urban bear populations.

One interesting question for researchers is why some bears, like the one that headed to the far end of Western North Carolina, return to Asheville.

But that may be difficult to answer.

“We just don’t know that yet, but we do speculate that there is something drawing them back to Asheville,” Gould said.

Bear cubs typically live with their mothers for more than a year until she is ready to mate again. Then these young bears are forced to head out on their own.

“Typically females go somewhere adjacent to mom’s home range. Typically males travel a lot farther, which we have seen, but they don’t normally come back,” Gould said. “So this is a little bit new to us.”

It’s an early observation based on what researchers have seen with four or five bears in the study. The study’s findings are still several years away.

“The fact that they (some of the bears) are doing these horseshoes and these loops and coming back to Asheville is really interesting,” Gould said.

Right now, about 32 bears are fitted with GPS collars. Since the study began in 2014, biologists have captured more than 100 bears and they’ve placed collars on around 70, according to Carraway.

The bears were captured and collared either inside the city limits or within one mile of the city limits. The biologists divided Asheville into four quadrants, and they've caught bears in all four.

In some cases, collared bears have died, hit by cars or were killed during hunting season. In other cases, some of the collars were programmed to come off.

The collars send the bear’s location to a satellite. When collared bears are outside the city limits, the collars send one location an hour. Inside the city limits, their location is documented every 15 minutes.

When Gould plots bear movements, "it completely covers the city limits of Asheville."

So far, about 85 percent of the collared bears have documented locations inside the city limits, according to Gould.

Some are spending little time there — maybe 5 to 10 percent of their locations occurred inside the city.

For others, more than 90 percent of their locations were documented inside the city, meaning they basically live inside Asheville.

The biologists also found more than one-third of the dens were inside the city during the first year, Gould said.

In some cases, dens were found alongside busy highways.

“Maybe that’s a strategy that works,” Carraway said. “Nobody is going to bother them there.”

Source or ‘sink’ habitat

Gould said based on their movements, the majority of collared bears so far appear to be “resident” bears.

“Those are bears that stay where we caught them,” Gould said.

One question researchers have is whether Asheville is good habitat or whether it acts as a “sink” for bears, providing food but also preventing them from leaving and mixing with the larger bear population.

“If bears are coming to Asheville because they have an easy year-round food source and they can get really big, that’s one thing,” Gould said. “But if they’re getting hit by vehicles and they’re nuisance bears so people are shooting them, and they can’t get back out to breed, to reach the surrounding population, then you would start to think of Asheville as a sink as opposed to a source.”

Among the young bears in the study that left Asheville, about 40 percent were killed, Gould said. They were either hit by cars, harvested or were killed by property owners.

The bear that trekked across WNC and then back again traveled around 160 miles, according to Gould. He was one of three very large young siblings that headed out on their own this year.

Both his brothers were killed. One was shot during hunting season and the other appeared to be shot outside of hunting season, Gould said.

The last known whereabouts of the surviving bear was in south Buncombe, somewhere near the airport. But he is no longer fitted with a collar.

High interest in study

Researchers need more years of data to determine what kind of habitat the city provides.

One thing they already know is that the study has captured the interest of the community.

John Haas, who lives on Town Mountain Road, got to watch as biologists examined and then placed a collar on a bear on his property.

“It was fascinating to see the total examination,” he said. “I think it’s such an interesting study.”

He’d love to know more about the movements of the bears in Asheville.

“Where they are traveling to? Where they are sleeping during the winter? Where are the dens?” he said.

The researchers have trapped six bears on Tom Noblett’s property in the Riceville area outside the city limits. Noblett has about 50 acres that join the Blue Ridge Parkway.

“Back in the 80s, we weren’t seeing bears around here, but in the last few years, we really started to see a lot of bears around,” Noblett said.

Noblett hopes the study will help educate the public.

“The biggest problem is people feeding bears, and it’s a huge problem,” he said. Noblett said he heard someone in his neighborhood was feeding a bear by hand.

“Bears are not vicious animals, but they are wild animals and they have to be treated with respect,” he said. “I’m afraid with people feeding bears it’s just a matter of time before there’s a serious incident.”

Gould said those involved in the study are hoping to use it to educate the community. Property owners involved in the study have been “fantastic,” he said.

The researchers started a Facebook page with updates about the project that has more than 1,800 likes. The page can be found at https://www.facebook.com/urbanbearstudy/

“People wanted us to post pictures and videos, which we do. …We’re answering questions, trying to brainstorm how to problem solve if they have a bear that’s in their area and it’s getting into their trash,” Gould said. “It’s been this great educational outreach piece."