It's 4.30 in the morning and we're on the coast in North Carolina and we're going to go look for some bears.

This is one of the field crews that's been heading out every day to collect samples from over 1,300 sites spread out across the east coast of North Carolina.

And this is Kaitlyn, research coordinator for the project.

Hope you guys have a good day.

Good luck everyone.

Kaitlyn said people are often surprised to hear that there are black bears in coastal North Carolina.

I like calling them swamp bears, but sometimes we call them beach bears.

Most people think of North Carolina bears, they're out in Nashville, they're out in the mountains.

But we actually have some of the highest densities and some of the biggest bears in the state and the country here in eastern North Carolina.

Actually, we have more bears in eastern North Carolina than up in the mountains.

We estimate around 11,000 to 13,000 bears in the coast.

And that actually makes North Carolina very unique in the eastern United States.

North Carolina stands alone that you're heading to the beach, you're likely to see a bear along the way.

That's pretty darn cool because it's very exciting to see a bear.

I've been doing bear research for 26 years now.

I still get excited when I see a bear, it never gets old.

And the reason we have so many bears in eastern North Carolina, it's just there's lots of habitat, fewer people, and lots of food available, both natural and unnatural, such as agricultural crops.

To learn more about how bears are dispersed across the diverse landscape of eastern North Carolina, teams have been collecting data over the course of two summers.

And while it would be awesome to see a bear today, what we really want to find are their hairs.

So this is called a hair snare or hair sampling site.

Sometimes when we say snare, people think we're trapping bears, but we're not trying to trap bears.

We never have with this setup.

That's not the intent here.

The idea is that we set up this kind of barbed wire corral with usually three trees and we stretch this wire really tight between those trees so that if bears are in the area and they come to check out the bait that we hang here in the middle, they have to somehow climb over, under, or through the barbed wire and hopefully leave behind a hair sample.

That's what we're looking for right now is those little tufts of fur, those little hair follicles that they leave behind.

Oh, there's a nice one right there.

Nice.

Hey.

Oh, look at this one.

Look at that.

Oh!

Nice.

Gloves and heat are used to prevent contamination between samples.

We got a big clump of hair here.

We're going to try and get as much of that hair as we can here in one pull.

Each cluster of hair is carefully placed in its own envelope because what researchers like Fabian are really after from these hairs is the bear DNA attached to them.

Currently, there hasn't been any genetic study in the Coastal Bear Management Unit, so we don't really know how genetically similar or how genetically different they are.

This study will unravel a lot of that unknown information and actually allow us to investigate that in detail.

That lighter part of the hair, sort of white, grayish, that's the actual follicle and that's what contains the DNA and that's what we actually process in the lab.

Back in the lab, a bear-specific primer will be added to target and amplify any bear DNA in the sample.

Then genetic sequencing will be used to identify individual bears.

I like to think of it like a code.

Organisms of the same species will share about 99% of the same code and that 1% is what makes us different.

Besides hairs, the team is always keeping a lookout for other bear sign, like scratches on a tree.

These are actually probably pretty fresh.

Or other more scatological evidence.

Some bear scat there.

I'll go look at some poop.

Sure.

Oh yeah.

Definitely some bear scat.

Can you tell what it's been eating?

A lot of plant fiber.

Yeah, not many seeds.

So we do work on a lot of farms, so a lot of times you'll see, you know, anthropogenic food sources in the bear's diet.

Anthropogenic being like, humans planted this and the bears happen to be eating pieces, parts of it.

A lot of the times these farms and these agricultural fields will border up against these like dense wooded areas.

So bears live in the wooded areas and then they'll come out for lunch, go back into the woods.

Yeah, so here you can see that most likely a bear was having this for lunch.

They sort of eat it like we do.

Bears are opportunistic in a similar way that we are.

I tend to eat what's convenient and what tastes the best and maybe has the highest, maybe not nutritional value, but caloric value.

I mean, they're super adaptable as a species.

They live in tons of areas across the country.

And so wherever they can find the resources to survive, they can potentially adapt to live.

Although bear sign is abundant on the coast these days, that wasn't always the case.

Black bears, first, are a wildlife success story.

But we're fortunate about that because at one point in time, we hardly had any bears on the landscape.

Black bears in North Carolina historically were really found all over the place, all across the state.

Following the arrival of an expanding human population, unregulated hunting and conversion of forest land to agricultural fields and urban development really pushed those bears out to the mountains and out to the swamps and pocosins in the coast.

Pretty much by the 1970s, we had an estimated less than a thousand bears across North Carolina.

Colleen says bear management efforts starting in the 70s helped restore and stabilize black bear populations in North Carolina.

So we're at a place now that we've restored bears on the landscape.

Bears have adapted to living in a highly disturbed environment, living with people.

The future of bears really now relies on our people willing to adapt to living with bears.

This coastal bear research project is going to be very impactful as we update our current bear management plan.

What is the state of bears in North Carolina?

Where are we now?

We want to get a better idea of what the coastal bear population looks like.

And the more detailed population density data that the study is gathering will shine a new light on where bears are in the coastal landscape.

Current data describing North Carolina's coastal black bear population comes from a partnership with licensed hunters who send a very important pre-molar to North Carolina's Wildlife Resources Commission.

There's a small tooth that's located behind the canine of a black bear, and that is how we actually can age a bear.

The main way we've been monitoring trends in the bear population has been through pulling that tooth and getting that age at harvest, getting the sex at harvest.

We've been doing that since the 80s.

We continue to do it now.

And while we've been getting great information, reliable population growth trends, the one thing that we've questioned is when it estimates how many bears are on the landscape.

The bears that are removed from the population in a hunting season may not be necessarily representative of what bears in the overall population look like.

And so we want to make sure that we're accounting for all of the bears that are out there and not just the ones that are getting harvested.

So we recognize that we needed an unbiased way to estimate the bear population as well as the density of bears across that landscape.

And that's why we're doing this, what we call the Hare-Snare Study.

This is an improved way that we can actually sample a non-hunted population.

It'll provide a lot more information than just relying on harvested individuals.

A big part of bear management is actually people management.

We are seeing more and more people who aren't used to seeing a bear and they're wondering, "What the heck do I do?"

Well, one, if you see a bear, really, that's exciting.

Really enjoy it, appreciate that moment.

You know, you're seeing something that represents a great wildlife success story, a success story all North Carolinians should be proud of.

The number one way we can assure bears remain a success story in North Carolina is people.

People being tolerant of them, people learning to live with them.

Because again, no matter now where you are in North Carolina, there's a chance you're going to see a bear.

And so if we can get people to continue to accept bears on the landscape, living with bears, we can better assure that the success story we have now continues for generations to come.

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