forests

A January Bear

/ Mike Fitz / 5 Comments

It was late January, but I enjoyed nearly perfect hiking weather in Big Bend National Park. The sky was clear, the wind was calm, and the temperatures hovered in the hiking Goldilocks range (for me, that’s the low 60˚s F). I had spotted a few piles of bear scat earlier that day, but all were dry and desiccated. Then in the late afternoon, I found one particularly fresh pile of crap.

This scat was soft and pliable and hadn’t been exposed to the dry desert air for very long. (I poked it with a stick to gain a very scientific measure of its age.) Was there a bear nearby? I hoped to find out.

The previous day, I stopped in the Chisos Basin Visitor Center to purchase a book to help me search for the park’s endemic oaks. A map on the visitor center wall was marked with sticky notes identifying when and where people had spotted black bears. At least a dozen had been seen over the past two weeks. I made a mental note to watch carefully for bear sign. Maybe, just maybe, I would be lucky enough to see one for myself.

Mountain rising above pine and juniper forest

The pinyon-oak-juniper habitat near Emory Peak (center) is preferred habitat for Big Bend’s black bears.

Although I spent considerable time searching for the endemic oaks (and found at least a couple, plus some species rarely found in the U.S.), bears were never far from my mind. Backcountry campsites all had bear-resistant food storage boxes, and signs clearly informed people that bears will take your unattended pack.

metal sign. Text says, "Bear Country Do Not Leave Back Packs Unattended"

Occasionally, I’d find old piles of bear scat or a marking tree.

scratch marks on bark of tree

Black bears used this Arizona cypress (Hesperocyparis arizonica) near Boot Spring as a marking tree.

No long after I photographed the marking tree, I stumbled on the aforementioned scat. Its freshness caught my attention, but it wasn’t steaming so I couldn’t be sure if a bear was close or not. I only knew it was there earlier in the day. As I proceeded up the trail, motivated to pick up my pace and return to the campground before dark, two hikers traveling in the opposite direction told me they had just seen a bear not far from the trail. This was their first wild black bear sighting, and they spoke excitedly about their experience. I thanked them for the info and continued on, now even more alert.

The hikers said the bear was near a switchback in the trail, not far from a backcountry campsite. I slowed my pace as I approached that location, not wanting to startle the animal. A moment later, through some thick vegetation, I heard cracking branches and there it was—a black bear.

black bear ears seen through thick vegetation

My soon-to-be award winning wildlife photo of a black bear in Big Bend National Park. Move over Tom Mangelsen.

What would a bear be doing out in January? Since bears are omnivorous and eat a wide variety of food, their scat reveals a world of information about where they’ve been and what they’ve been up to. The fresh bear scat I found 10 minutes before, like the older scat on the trails, was filled with fragments of pinyon nuts and shells. Pine nuts are exceptionally nutritious, containing almost 700 calories per 100 grams. The pinyons pines in the Chisos Mountains seemed to have produced a sizable cone crop in 2016, one which helped sustain the bears into mid winter.

pile of black bear scat in grass

Pinyon pine nut shells and fragments fill this fresh pile of bear scat. I found this scat just moments before seeing an active bear.

The density of the shrubs made it difficult for me to se exactly what the actual bear was doing, but it appeared to have its nose to the ground and it wasn’t moving far. Perhaps it was still feeding on pine nuts.

pine cones on the ground

These Mexican pinyon pine (Pinus cembroides) cones still hold their fatty nuts.

Black bears in the Chisos Mountains rely heavily on habitats with pinyon, oak, juniper, and grassy talus slopes, although male bears will make more frequent use of low elevation areas. Even so, this was January 26. Shouldn’t the bear be inside a den?

Black bears in more northernly locations hibernate well before January. However, bears in Big Bend don’t typically enter their dens until late January or February, and when they do many don’t seem to fully enter hibernation. Male bears, especially, are more likely to remain active. Pregnant females in Big Bend, like other bear populations in North America, have the longest average denning period, beginning in mid to late December and ending in late April.

This winter activity isn’t unique to Big Bend’s bears. Black bears in Florida have similar winter dormancy patterns. Mild weather and the prospect of food, especially, can keep bears active for longer time spans. After all, bears are avoiding winter famine more than winter weather when they hibernate. The bear I saw probably wasn’t doing anything abnormal for a Big Bend black bear. It was just another bear doing bear things like eating and shitting in the woods.

Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest

/ Mike Fitz / 5 Comments

Old growth forests in the eastern U.S were formidable barriers to colonization, places to be subdued and civilized, to fuel industrialization, not preserved. Today, we view old growth forests differently. They give refuge to rare species, support diverse ecological communities, and often provide the conditions necessary for trees to attain their maximum size and age. While visiting Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in the Nantahala National Forest, I thought about why these forests remain so important despite the some negative changes they’ve recently undergone.

Prior to European colonization, forests in the eastern U.S. formed a mosaic of complex habitats, owing to natural disturbance regimes and the influences of American Indian nations. An unbroken old growth canopy stretching for the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River is mythical and never existed. Lightning-caused fires, human-caused fires, tornadoes, ice storms, hurricanes, and insects imparted constant change. Some forests were likely disturbed every few decades at minimum, while others grew undisturbed for hundreds of years.

Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is one of those places that grew relatively undisturbed. It is a pocket of old growth tucked away in the rugged mountains of western North Carolina. While many impressive trees grow here, the most impressive and largest trees are Liriodendron tulipifera, the tulip tree. Also known as tulip-poplar or yellow-poplar, tulip trees grow fast and tall (the tallest individual tree in the eastern U.S. is currently a tulip tree) and are easy to identify in summer because of their distinctively-shaped leaves.

No live leaves hung from the tulip trees on the overcast, early January day when I visited, but this allowed me to contemplate the trees’ full scale. The tulip trees at Joyce Kilmer are the largest of the species that I’ve ever seen. Many exceed 15 feet in circumference at chest height, approach 150 feet tall, and are several hundred years old.

person standing at base of large tree

I was impressed by complex crowns of the largest trees. Most trees in the eastern U.S. today don’t attain such large, complex crowns. They simply aren’t allowed to grow long enough. Many of the crowns were scarred and broken by centuries of battles with wind, ice, and other forces that try to break the tree down.

crown of large tulip tree

Since tulip poplars are intolerant of shade, the largest tulip trees at Joyce Kilmer likely sprouted and began to dominate the canopy after a major disturbance, like a fire or tornado, swept through the area several hundred years ago. The now towering tulip trees effectively shade the understory, suppressing the germination and growth of their offspring. Instead of young tulip trees, the understory of the forest was filled with more shade tolerant species like sugar maple and American beech. In a couple of hundred years future visitors may see giant sugar maples growing over the decaying remnants of tulip poplars.

Despite the beauty and stateliness of the trees at Joyce Kilmer, this isn’t forest primeval. No such thing exists in the eastern U.S. Evidence of significant, human-caused changes are easy to find here. Until recently, Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest contained many large eastern hemlock trees. Now, however, almost every hemlock tree in the grove has been killed by hemlock woolly adelgid, a non-native, invasive insect that basically sucks starch out of the hemlock. I found only a handful of live hemlocks in the grove, and none were particularly large.

dead hemlock trees

These hemlocks were killed by hemlock woolly adelgid.

Disturbed, young forests are easy to find. Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is different. It represents the forests which used to exist and provides examples of the threats forests face today. The tulip trees at Joyce Kilmer are massive, dwarfing almost everything there, especially me. I walked under the trees in wonder even though this place is very changed. I can’t pretend this is the same forest with the same species composition as it was even a hundred years ago. Among other changes, the hemlocks are dead or dying, American chestnuts are functionally extinct, and passenger pigeons no longer darken the skies. Still, I don’t want to demean this place as less special because it’s not what it once was. On the contrary, it is more special because forests like this are so rare.

person standing at base of large tree