Bear Grease - Ep. 351: Backwoods University - Mississippi's Most Controversial Native Animal

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Black bears are a native animal to the state of Mississippi. In fact, back in the 1800s all the way to the early 1900s, Mississippi was a sought out destination for black bear hunting. However, due to multiple factors, they were almost pushed to extirpation. In this episode, we are going to learn through hands on experience and a discussion with Mississippi black bear program leader, Anthony Ballard, the conservation history of this particular charismatic megafauna, and dive into why their natural population rebound is stirring up so much controversy among Mississippi residents. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. In this episode, we're going to dive deep into the conservation history of Mississippi's once celebrated but now controversial native species, the American Black Bear. We're going to start this episode off by going back and forth between two historical accounts from the same state of Mississippi, separated by nothing but time. The first being clips from local Mississippi news networks, dates ranging from 10 years ago to just this past June. The second being excerpt from a book titled The Bear Hunter by James T. McCafferty, which looks into the culture of bear hunting in Mississippi from the 1800s to the early 1900s. As we flip back and forth between these two sources,

I want you to pay attention to the heavy contrast between then and now. Keep in mind, Both are talking about the same state, but it sounds like two different worlds. We'll kick off first with recent clips from local Mississippi news networks. It's the biggest story on WAPT.com. Justin Morgan got a trail camera photo of a black bear roaming in Mississippi. Is this the first time you found one at Simpson County? I think there have been a couple farther south, but I don't recall one. Far north.

Excerpts from the book The Bear Hunter by James T. McCafferty. In the 19th century, at least among America's sportsmen, the Mississippi Delta was celebrated as a bear hunter's mecca. Hunters of memes, and often those without,

flocked to Mississippi to hunt the Delta's black bears. This is remarkable. All right. Action News 5's Garner Montgomery joins us live in studio now with an exclusive video he shot of a black bear

in DeSoto County, Garner? That's right, Joe, enjoy. This is a real treat. to see the first black beer siding in DeSoto County in at least 10 years. The Delta Woods were full of bears in pioneer times. One account from a man named George F. Maynard born in 1853, states, so ubiquitous was the bear in Coahoma County of his youth that when farmers failed oaks to make room for crops, sow bears and their cubs would appear almost immediately to devour tender twigs of the fallen monarchs. It was almost impossible to make a corn crop in some

parts of the county on account of the depredations of that famous animal. People would go out in the corn patch early in the morning and kill a bear before breakfast. Black bears are considered an endangered species in the state of Mississippi. They're mostly spotted in the southern delta, but there have only been a handful of bear sightings here in northwest Mississippi in the past 10 years. There were old bear hunters who never had a pound of bacon in the house. They would kill a bear and cure it like bacon and make and save the oil by the barrel, which was fine for cooking purpose. There are tales of a famed bear hunter named Fincher Bobo, who once killed six bears in a single day. From plantation slave to English nobleman, from backwood squatter to American president, and every station in between.

They hunted bears in the Mississippi Delta. Two different accounts, two different time periods, but they're speaking of the same place. In the book, it sounds like they're swimming in bears. While on the news report, a black bear sighting might as well fall in line with the Sasquatcher UFO claim. So the question we have to answer is what happened to the black bears in Mississippi. Luckily for us, it's very well documented. Historically, black bears were abundant throughout Mississippi along with the rest of the southeast. This fact was made obvious by the quotes from the book along with several other publications.

There were thousands of them, just in Mississippi alone. By the early 1900s, throwback to the last episode about Miss Fannie Cook, we know how much wildlife destruction was going on then. there was an estimate of less than 12. Not 1,200, 12. In the entire state. This almost complete extirpation came as a result of severe over-harvest from the fur trade, market hunting,

sport hunting, illegal take, and land use changes that resulted in habitat degradation and loss. As a result of this, the state of Mississippi closed bear hunting in 1932. Y'all may recognize this as the same year that the game and thursday, Fish Commission was established, protecting bears from being wiped out, sat high on the priority

list along with white-tailed deer and wild turkeys. But that was 1932. Ninety-three years have passed since then. Where are we at with Mississippi Black Bears now? I think it's time we find out. It's now June of 2025, and the sound that you're hearing is me riding in a side-by-side with Mississippi Black Bear Programme leader, Anthony Ballard. We're in Claiborne County, Mississippi, and we're headed to dart a bear with the tranquilizer that Anthony has caught in one of his traps. Anthony believes this could be one of the biggest bears he's ever caught. Where's the bear? I mean, are we close to him? Yeah, we're probably 150 yards. Oh, okay. Turn that and he's got to end of his foot block. Gotcha, gotcha. What you're hearing now is Anthony loading the dart gun and explaining to the

Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks in turn how to chart the vitals once we get the bear sedated and out of the trap. We then set off walking down the long-lane food plot that ran the top of a ridge to the bear trap situated at the end of it. The goal is for everyone to move slow and quiet. Anthony wants the bear as calm as possible for the ease of getting a tranquilizer dart into him. The trap is shaped like a cylinder. Imagine a large barrel laid over on its side. It has a door on one end through which Anthony put bait to lure the bear inside the trap. Anthony can monitor all of this live through the surveillance of a cellular camera. Once the bear is inside, Anthony can drop the trap door electronically.

This bear had entered the trap just the night before, so by the time we got there, he had only been there for a matter of hours. You want me and her to swing around the door side? Yeah. Okay. Be careful it kind of drops off over there before. We're very far. As we approach the trap, it's always.

a little unnerving. I mean, there is a wild bear in there after all. The plan is for me to swing to the back end of the trap while Anthony goes to the front. If the bear is in a favorable position, Anthony will go ahead and shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. If not, he'll signal to me and I'll begin tapping on the back of the trap to make noise enticing the bear to move. Anthony leans over. The bear is asleep and not in a favorable darting position, so he gives me the signal, and I know it's time to make some noise. judging off that sound, I think the bear's awake. Yep, that's an awake bear.

That bear cannot be any more awake than he is right now. The problem is he's still not in a position for a good shot, so Anthony adjust and I continue to make noise to try and make the bear move around more. His heads this way. This is a game of inches. Anthony can't just wing a dart in there and hope for the best. It has to be precise, and we need the bear to turn just a little bit more. almost there, and there's the shot.

Got him. The dart is in, and now we wait for it to take effect, which normally takes a few minutes. After we are certain the bear is unconscious, we open the trap and begin to unload it. We're just going to lift and pull back toward that tree. Say when. When?

Let his head, watch his head. Come on, buddy. Come on, man. All right. We found out later that this bear weighed 412 pounds. All right, let's try it now. 412 pounds. So as you could imagine, it was no easy task getting him out of the trap.

All right. Smokes, Anthony. Who is that? The rest of the time that we had the bear sedated was somewhere around 30 minutes. In that time, we got his body weight, a hair sample for genetics, a blood sample to test for certain diseases and hormone levels, and a tooth extraction for age. This is vital information for the Black Bear program. When everything was collected, Anthony and Jim,

rejected the bear with a reversal drug. We then walked up the hill where we could watch from a safe distance, and in about 10 minutes or so, the bear woke up and bounded off back into the woods. To say this whole thing was a cool experience would be quite the understatement. The opportunity to get to do hands-on conservation with such a cool and historic species just doesn't come around all that often, and the Mississippi Black Bear program is doing some really cool and important work, which I think it's time we all learned about.

After this eventful bear workup with Anthony, I sat down with him for an interview so that we all can get a deeper understanding of the Mississippi Black Bear, the program, as well as the status, future, and controversy surrounding this native animal. How long has Mississippi had a Black Bear program? The early work was done by the Museum of Natural Science. And when I say early, we're talking about, you know, mid to late 90s. Okay, so 90s. So post-fanny cook times? Yes, yes, very much so. And that's just because there weren't really that many bears in Mississippi.

There's like 12. Yeah, you had an occasional sighting here and there. You had an occasional roadkill. I mean, we've got records of mortalities all the way back to the 70s. The need for an actual program and for wildlife and fisheries to take that over came in 2002. And what was the reason for that? In the early 2000s, you had a lot more emphasis on. looking at those populations, the subpopulations, particularly in Arkansas and Louisiana,

you know, habitat connectivity, looking at interbreeding between different populations to kind of bolster genetic diversity. As a result of that, you had a lot more dispersal into Mississippi. And so there's some connections there of, you know, that original, you can say, kind of apparent, you know, population. And then those, that kind of infant population moving into the delta, more and more sows that were, you know, started to breed and reproduce in there and then kind of grow from there. So the Black Bear program was originally formed by the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, but it was handed off to the Department of Wildlife out of necessity in 2002 due to a noticeable increase in bears. This can be attributed to dispersal of bears coming into Mississippi from Arkansas and Louisiana,

as well as slow but natural growth from the small resident population that was able to do so because of the protections they were provided in 1932. And just a small personal request here, nobody mentioned to Clay or Brent that Arkansas Bears were helping out Mississippi Bears, okay? I mean, they just talk enough trash as it is. Let me ask this, because I want to clarify this early, talking about bears moving in from Arkansas and Louisiana.

Like, I understand that the, let's say, the population of just Mississippi, the Black Bear population of Mississippi. I understand that we wiped it out. to really, really low numbers, but we never fully wiped it out. Right. That's correct, right? So extinction is a species that just goes completely, it's gone, right?

Everybody understands that. Extrapation is gone from a particular region or area of state. We were near extirpation in Mississippi. The lowest estimation was 12 bears in the state. That's functionally extirpated. That's essentially none. That's wild. Yeah.

You know, people wonder why we don't have it. many bears as places like Louisiana or Arkansas. Well, it's for two reasons. Number one, Arkansas and Louisiana never got quite that low in their population estimates. And they also actively brought bears from up north to bolster those populations. Mississippi never actually did. So Louisiana and Arkansas have had bears reintroduced to some degree. Yes, they had bears reintroduced. And then they also moved bears, you know, within those two states between subpopulations to kind of even out those genetics and kind of foster those numbers and facilitate that connectivity. Mississippi took a more passive approach.

There was one attempt to restocking, I guess you could say, in 1934. It was unsuccessful. It was, I think, three pairs, so a total of six bears that were brought here, for whatever reason, that was not successful. So all of the bears that we have here in Mississippi, are either dispersed from higher density populations in Arkansas and Louisiana, or they were born here. There were no bears that were actually brought here to Mississippi.

I do think it's prudent, though. I have to speculate a little bit here, but I do think that it is important that it was tried to be reintroduced in 1934. And here's what I mean. We know, because of the last episode, that Fannie Cook established the Game Commission in 1932. And one of the first things they started doing, there were several, like, restocking efforts of native game animals, animals that they wanted to make sure were kept around. So immediately upon the establishment of that game commission, they started restocking efforts of deer.

They started it on turkeys. They started it on quail. And so it's important to know that they tried and the general public that supported the establishment of that commission, which is now in DWFP, I think it's important to note that they did try to restock them. All right, Backwoods University enrollees, if there was going to be an exam at the end of this episode, which there's not, but if there was, one of the main takeaways would be this right here.

So lean in. Black bears were not, I repeat, were not reintroduced to Mississippi. In the realm of controversy surrounding the species, which we're going to dive into in more detail later, the misconception that black bears were wiped out completely and then physically brought back in and reintroduced comes up all the time. And it just isn't the case. They have always been here.

But I think it is extremely important that we realize that it was attempted one time to restock them in 1934. Here's why. Take a look of the list of animals of which restocking efforts were made. White-tailed deer, high community value, wild turkeys, high community value, Bob White Quail, high community value, black bears, high community value, at that time. Remember what the stated reasons were for black bears almost being wiped out in the first place. Fur trade, market hunting, sport hunting, habitat loss. Think back to quotes from the book and tales of people traveling to Mississippi just to hunt bears. I'm not sitting here claiming that

black bears were this perfect species that never caused a single problem. They did, as well as many other wildlife species, but they were unarguably sought after and valued as a game animal. Of that, I have no doubt. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all

three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good

turkey noises and getting action. You know, we were talking earlier about the mindset of people moving through history. You know, it's really easy to play Monday morning quarterback and say, well, these people had the wrong idea about this or they, you know, they completely disregarded this aspect of conservation or whatever the case is. And like you said, I think it's important to kind of put yourself in that situation and maybe understand that, you know, they weren't working with Google, you know, they weren't working with major universities that could do big time research.

They weren't working with a huge budget. And they were doing what they could with what they had at the time. And I think the important part is they had the right idea. And they may not have done everything exactly right. But it was really a paradigm shift between a mentality of kill everything. It doesn't matter. They'll replenish somehow, just live for the day and take what you want versus, hey, maybe we need to build some longevity into this and some structure and some regulations

to where we can preserve the future. I think that's the biggest takeaway from that. And there's a common thread in that, no, like talking about, like you could go all the way back to the Bison episode when Jeremy was explaining to me, said a lot of some of like the follies in the market hunting with bison is they were misunderstood,

and people thought they were a migratory animal. Right. So a lot of the market hunters at the time would think, hey, we can kill every single one of these buffalo. The next herd is going to mind. migrate through. So it was like a functional misunderstanding the ecology. And that trickled down all the way to the early 1900s with so many of the game animals. The difference is that things like Whitetel and Turkey's got a chance to rebound, whereas Black Bears, it was just a little bit of a different story, different timeline. Yeah. And I think it was a different timeline for reasons may have had to do with management, but also you got to think about the reproductive potential of Black Bears versus something like deer or turkey. You know, if you've got a good habitat and you've got good nutrition that can, that has a high caring capacity, you can make a lot of turkey or a lot of deer in a pretty short amount of time. Black bears don't breed until three to five years of age.

They're only going to have two or three. And the survival of those cubs are, you know, 50 to 70 percent. The timeline and the pattern is just not comparable to something like white-tailed deer. And it's just not as fast. Like you said, it's just one different timeline. Anthony just gave us one of the most important pieces of information regarding the trajectory and current status of the Mississippi black bear population. We already knew that all these species were almost wiped out in the early 1900s, but what I didn't know was the different dynamics around each of their ability to rebound. Thankfully, white-tailed deer and wild turkeys can reproduce relatively quickly, especially when compared to the reproductive timeline of a black bear.

I mean, think about it. Many white-tailed does begin reproducing at a year old, in some instances, even earlier. than that, and they typically breed every year. Wild turkey hens usually start breeding around a year old, and they can usually nest every year after that. A black bear, however, doesn't start breeding until the age three or sometimes five, and may only have two to three cups. The timeline is vastly different, which makes for an unavoidable longer time of population recovery. This explains why when all these species were pushed to the brink around the same time, black bears are seemingly the last in line on their way to recovery. What is the overall function of the Black Bear program? Has the function stayed the same from its start with the Game and Fish in 2002 to now, or has it changed a little bit? Has there

been stuff added to it? I would say it's always changing. Management is never the same, right? You know, the outcomes are different. The goals are different as different species fluctuate, and there's different management needs. And it's been the same with the Bear Program. You know, early on, it was a lot about, you know, compiling as much data as we could, as many observations as we could, and really trying to just figure out what was going on, right, with those early populations. And then as that grew, you know, you're still looking at research. You're still looking at those same type parameters, but you're looking at it on a larger scale because you have more and more area to look at bears in. And then eventually what's going to happen is you go from a

preservationist type of approach where the harvest is completely banned. You're focusing on allowing that animal to come back to healthy numbers and eventually the day is going to come where we institute harvest again because we say, okay, you know, the federal protections of black bears were removed in 2016 in Mississippi. At some day there's going to come a day where we say the state protections are removed and we're now going to implement a hunting season. And, you know, But people kind of say, all right, well, you're just wanting this species to come back so that we can have a hunting season. And it's really kind of the opposite of that. You know, we're having a hunting season because the population is healthy enough now to sustain it.

Big important key takeaway number two. Y'all ready? The end goal of protecting black bears from 1932 up until now is to restore them to a sustainable population. And can any of y'all guess what is synonymous with a sustainable population? A hinnable population. a hunting season, a return to allowing black bears to be used as a natural and renewable resource, a return to what they were sought after and valued for back in their earlier years of abundance. And although it is taking a significantly longer time to get there than it did several other of our game species,

they are following the same trajectory as several other widely celebrated wildlife conservation wins. And when the day comes that we reach this milestone with the Black Bears of Mississippi, in my opinion, it should be celebrated the same. You do hear a lot of like, oh, the agency's doing this just so they can make another tag and it'll make them more money. Or, you know, and it's, you get like the kind of the sense that they're almost putting it like as government overreach. And you heard some people kind of come right out and say like, we should be able to do what we want kind of thing. And the reason that we don't go and just do what we want is it didn't work last. We tried that.

Yeah. Exactly. People did what they want, and that's why we started it. If we kept on doing what we wanted, you wouldn't have any deer to be worried about. Right. Like, that's just the truth. Yeah. Would you say the main goal now of the Black Bear program is to one day be able to facilitate a hunting season?

Is that the main goal, or is there, like, other priority of goals? I would say there's two main goals. The first main goal is to have a good solid. research foundation to make management decisions, right? Because unless you know how many bears you have, unless you know how fast your population is growing, and you can answer those questions, you can't make informed management decisions about a hunting season. So, you know, the question always gets asked, how many bears do we have? And what people want is for me to spit out an answer. We have this between this many and this many bears. What we're trying to do right now in the

research that we're doing with Mississippi State University, basically they're building two different models based on the data that we've collected either here recently or historically throughout the program's history. And they're building a density estimate. So once you can identify enough individuals genetically, you can say, all right, you probably have this many individuals in this particular area. All right. So you can extrapolate and say, you probably have this type of occupancy in this larger area. And eventually you get to a point where it's representative of an entire portion of the state or even the whole state. All right.

The second piece of that puzzle is called your population projection model. What that is going to do is we take all of the historical data that we've ever had, every mortality we've had, all the lifespans that we know of, what our immigration, immigration from different states is, how many offspring that bears had? How old were they when they first had offspring? All of these different things go into that model to tell you, okay, here's how many bears you have now. Now, what is your projected population based on these parameters? What might be your population, two, five, ten, ten, fifteen years from now? At that point, you get basically a

growth curve, right? So then you can start adding in as a factor, something like harvest. Okay, if we harvest this many bears and if we harvest this many females, this many males, how is our population going to react? That's when you can start sectioning off different parts of the state, and that's when you can start setting regulations, that's how those recommendations are come about. And so as much as I wish it was just as simple as counting bears and spitting out a number, there's a lot more that goes into it that, you know, we have to make that informed decision. And we're trying to make that based on the absolute most homework we can have done so that we can get it right. Because, you know, you only get one shot at that and you got to get it right. Anthony told me that the question of

how many bears are there in Mississippi, sits high atop the list of questions he gets commonly asked. And if you couldn't tell from his response, it's something that they are not taking lightly. There's a hefty amount of work and research going into it, and hopefully it's something that they will have a number for before the end of this year. I plan to follow up with Anthony as soon as that number is ready, so stay tuned for that. I want to ask him how we use this information, and how does it play into making management decisions and setting hunting seasons? Most likely what happens is you'll have different bear management zones, units, whatever you'd want to call them, and then set harvest regulations on each one of those according to what your data says.

That last bear work up you and I did. You go in there, you dart him, you knock him out, took a tooth extraction, you took a blood sample, you took a hair sample, took a body weight. Like, what is all that data for? Like, what are you trying to gain from all that? The hair is for genetics. You can get a lot from genetics. but at the very minimum you can identify that individual because you can say that in this particular case,

M33, he was first caught as a, you know, X year old in 2023. He's now a Y year old in 2025. And we can say that he at least lived from 2020 to 25. The tooth that we pull, we send that off to a lab.

I send all the teeth off once a year. And they do what's called cement to manual. So they'll take a small sliver of that. They'll stain it, look out under a micro, microscope and they can count those cementum annuli rings like rings on a tree because you have basically a growing in a dormant stage in bears that's pretty pronounced. And so in the model, it's more valuable to say that you have a 10 year old versus you have an adult. The blood

sample, really it's just a catalog for me. We spend those down and freeze them. And then if we have a, let's say a project that comes up in another year or two, or we say we want to look at hormone levels in certain individuals or we want to look at this particular tighter for a disease that may have been present in the population. Now we have, you know, 50 samples to look through versus starting from zero and trying to pull blood on bears as we go. Gotcha.

And so some of it is more for catalog purposes and then some of it is for stuff that we're actively using. But a workup's a workup, and we always usually pull those things as we go. Yeah. To make sure we have them. And it takes, you know, an extra five or ten minutes to get that stuff. And it really does go a long way in looking at that data in the long term.

So think about the in the field bear workup that you heard taking place towards the beginning of this episode. If you remember, I said that it yields vital information for the bear program. And now we understand why. All of this data adds into the model that will help determine population size, population growth, and helps us make management decisions, like, determining when hunting season can be reopened, the nuts and bolts of conservation. Pretty cool, right? Somewhere in recent years, there's been like a significant uptick in bears, just here in Mississippi.

And I don't know what to attribute that to. Like more spillover from Louisiana, more spillover from Arkansas. Is that even happening? Or am I just like, is there any truth to that? Well, in your population, you're going to have basically an inflection point. in that growth curve. So you have, you know, if you have very small numbers, you're going to have very small growth rates. And then in a certain saturation, that curve is going to, is going to steep, going to get a lot steeper and start to go up at an increasing rate. So you can start

increasing at an increasing rate. So it's hard to tell exactly where we are on that growth rate. And again, that's, that's kind of why we're doing this research to see. I think it's been kind of a convergence of factors because you do have more bears on the landscape. You have more sightings. but you also have a growing public awareness of bears in Mississippi. Yeah. I think a lot of that can be attributed to social media. A lot of it can be attributed to security and game cameras just being so readily accessible. There's eyes everywhere.

Everybody has a ring doorbell. Everybody has cell cameras that are sending pictures all the time. There's more people that are leaving out cameras year-round versus just during deer season. Usually they're on a feeder. and I think all of those things together has kind of come together and made it seem like there's just bears all over the place when, you know, it's quite possible that five different people have seen the same bear that's gone and visited five feeders, you know. So it's hard to tell how much of that is actually, you know, is real and how much of that growth is, you know, because of the population and how much of it is kind of artificially inflated because of the public awareness and the visibility of bears. From my perspective, understanding to a degree what black bears do, like how they function, their ecology, all that stuff, I think it's awesome that this native animal is being able to return to its native range here in Mississippi for a plethora of reasons. One of them, like the possibility that there would be a hunting season on those again, that would be awesome to be able to hunt a bear here.

There's so much history with it. And there are some people that feel that way. There's also a lot of people that don't feel that. way. There's been a growing amount of controversy around black bears. And I want to tackle some of those topics. Yeah. Here's the obvious one, or one of the more obvious ones. Bears are dangerous. They're going to eat me. They're going to eat my kids. They're going to eat my dog. That's like an on going fear that you see with bears pop up. How do you deal with that? It's hard to tell people not to be afraid of things. I found that it's better to educate people about the

animal than it is to tell them not to be afraid of it, right? Because when you really boil it all down, people fear what they don't know. And I think in a lot of people's minds, it is an animal that lives somewhere else. And then when they find out that it lives close to them, they start thinking about it in a completely different way. Now it's real. You know, you were asking about the goals of the program earlier. Research is certainly one of the big ones. And I think the other half of that coin is education, you know, because the more people that we can make understand what bears are and what they are not, and just a few simple things, you know, to get by with bears around, the more educated public you're going to have. And I think the more that fear level goes down, you know,

I've taken people out on bear workups that were absolutely scared to death or hated bears. And then by the end of it, their mind is completely changed or it's at least changed to a point where they appreciate what we do and the process and the animal itself versus just being this thing that they completely don't understand. Anthony gave us a lot of good information there, but the statement that stuck with me the most and the one that I can't quit thinking about is people fear what they don't know. I also found it interesting that he's had firsthand experience

taking people out on bear workups that initially had negative feelings toward bears. but after seeing the animal with their own eyes and getting some actual exposure to it, their opinions changed for the positive. I've said it before on this podcast, and I'll say it again. You can't love what you don't understand. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use.

I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts.

Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I would encourage any of you out there that are currently on the negative side or maybe on the fence about black bears and their conservation to give yourself a chance to learn about the animal before making a judgment on it. One of the things about Mississippi that I love is that we do have a very large and popular hunting community.

Big part of that is white-tail deer hunting. One of the things that you hear pop up around controversy of a growing population of black bears is the fear that they're going to basically decimate your deer herd. You hear that they're really bad on fawns. They eat a lot of fonds. They're going to, man, if you have bears, you're not going to have any deer. I heard one guy say they're like, wherever you find a bear, you ain't going to find a deer. Right. Where do you go with all that?

Is there any truth to that? The short answer is no. first let's look at how many states have bear populations something like 39 or 40 i think most provinces in canada i think if that were the case then you would have deer populations that were decimated across most of north america we know that fawns are going to get eaten by predators okay that's a fact of life there's a certain percentage every year that you can expect to get eaten by predators some of those predators are bobcats coyotes and black bears we know that black bears will eat them opportunistically, right? And there's studies that I've looked at from Virginia, from Michigan,

from even Tensaw, Louisiana that say that, essentially, yes, there's going to be predation. There's a certain percentage that are going to get eaten. So let's say somewhere between 20 and 30 percent is what you normally see survival rate. That's the ones that actually make it to, let's say, six months old. Okay. That's 70 odd percent. of fons that are getting eaten is going to say relatively constant through time. All right. Regardless of blackberry presence or not. Right.

Due to predation. Yeah. Now, what proportions are eaten by coyotes, bobcats, or black bears may change depending on the density of those predators on the landscape. So basically you're talking about the difference between additive or compensatory predation. Okay. All right. So basically, let's take tin saw as an example.

Let's say we had tin saw that was only a two predator system. So you only had coyotes and bobcats. And then the recovery of the black bear happened. And over time, you have a greater and greater density of black bears. That doesn't mean you have a greater and greater proportion of white-tailed deer fawls that are getting predated. It means that those proportions within that percentage that are getting predated upon is changing. So that fawn would have gotten eaten. Now he's getting eaten by a black bear, whereas without the black bear, he might have gotten eaten by a coyote or bobcat.

at. I think it's pretty reductive to say that there's one particular predator that can cause these huge shifts when the data just doesn't bear that out. Has it happened locally somewhere? Maybe. But on the grand scheme of things on a landscape level, it just doesn't seem to be the case. Let's take that a step further. The bachelor lands within the Mississippi River. All right, you have these big islands and these big money camps where it's hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a share. And that's some of the most sought after deer hunting and turkey hunting in the southeast, maybe in the country. Very well managed deer herds out of this world, genetics, great nutrition, super healthy deer herds, right? Great turkey populations, abundant turkey populations.

And most of those areas up and down the Mississippi River are absolutely stacked with black bears. And, you know, if that were the case, and if black bears had that big of a negative population, population on deer or turkey, that's not what you would see in those areas. Is there any particular animal that on a population level suffers from the presence of black bears that we know of? I mean, about 90% of a bear's diet, you know, 80% to 90% is going to be plant matter of some sort. Really? Yeah.

Hear me out. The concern of not wanting other native game populations to suffer is a legitimate concern. However, what Anthony is telling us here is that with bears, this is not something to worry about. Not only does current research prove it, but think about the historical record of Mississippi from earlier. Prior to our own decimation of these species, Mississippi had white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, bob-white quail, bison, and black bears, all in abundance, along with many other game and non-game species. I don't know. It's almost like God designed it to be that way or something. Crazy, right? So in like the grand scope, like if you were to take all the stuff that people are

hinging on for reasons that they don't like bears for all these different factors or they're just, some people are just scared of them. Some of these folks, not all, the way that they are talking about bears, it leads me to ask the question, I'm like, what would you like us to do? Are you suggesting that we exterminate them? Because like some of the folks that come up with that, it's like that's what they actually are suggesting that we exterminate the bears. And most of these are part of the hunting community. My response to that is like, name a single time in our conservation history and our history with

wildlife as a hunting community, as a sustainable hunting community, because that's what we are, name a time in our history where we have elected to wipe out a native animal. Humans have, I guess, an intrinsic way of looking at wildlife as how they benefit from that species, right? Yeah. So we look at white-tailed deer. We hold it as a very valuable species. We look at turkey. We say they're very valuable because we hunt turkey. We consume turkey. We enjoy turkey. There's nothing wrong with that. We don't look at armadillos with that same value, right? So a lot of the way that we look at the inherent value of different species is based on kind of a self-serving attitude. So I think that's part of it. And once there is an opportunity that's opened up, bears as a resource,

I think a lot of that's going to go away. One of the questions I get a lot of times is, what good do bear do? I think what they're really saying is, what do they do for me? What good are they for me? And, you know, my question back to those people a lot of times is, what good is a wild turkey? What does a wild turkey do biologically that we couldn't do without? Well, that's blasphemy. You can't say that, you know.

But you think about it. You know, and the reason that we value them as human so much is because we like to hunt. them and we benefit from that. They're pretty and we enjoy them and believe me, I'm not hating on turkey hunters. Sure. But it's kind of that same principle. And so I look at it more of a kind of on a historic scale. Our conservation story is based on recognizing the damages that we were doing and then taking steps over the next years and decades and in centuries even to write those wrongs and to try to rebuild that in a responsible way that benefits the animals. where we have, you know, good, hunnable, sustainable populations and also doesn't encroach on people, on the rights of humans.

And it's a delicate balance, you know, and it's also, it can be particularly delicate with bears because they do cause, you know, damage and they do get into things. And, you know, I'm not going to sit here and say that they don't. And no bear manager is naive enough to say that they, you know, that's not an issue. But it's one of those things where I feel like it goes a lot back. of education. And, you know, once you can start building those little things in to make people's lives easier that do live around bears, and once you start building those habits in, then you can start appreciating the species on a more greater level than what do they do for me

immediately. And, I mean, you know, there's all kinds of animals that can be nuisance. You know, you've got to think about the biology of the animal, right? Bears have a seven times better sense of smell than bloodhounds. that's quite a sniffer right and they're biologically wired

specifically during certain times of the year to find food to find it in abundance and it takes a lot of food to support a three to 400 pound animal right

so you know you hear about nuisance bears and problem bears and that kind of stuff and certainly that can happen but let's take a deer feeder for instance regardless of your feelings

on deer feeder we can agree that basically what you're doing is putting out several hundred pounds of free calories out in the middle of the woods. A bear is biologically wired to find large amounts of calories at one time and try to consume that. And so, yes, it's aggravating. And I sympathize with people that lose cameras and four-wheeler seats and that kind of stuff. But bears are biologically wired to find food. They're naturally curious. They're very strong and they're very intelligent.

they're really good at getting into things. And it kind of goes back to that thing I tell people sometimes is, you know, it's not my job to make you like bears. It's my job to make you prepared to understand how to live with bears. Because the more of those little things that you can build into your daily routine, talking about, you know, driving a truck instead of walking, taking a garbage can out the day of versus the night before, those little small changes in your daily life that,

could potentially keep a bear off your property, keep food out of a bear's mouth that would have otherwise found it, that's when you start trying to kind of win the battle of, you know, living with bears and solving those problems before they occur. Ask a farmer if a deer can be a nuisance, you know. But we value deer, right? Right. And so it's always this balance of how do we get around those things and how do we mitigate those conflicts while also maintaining that whole balance that we're trying to maintain between wildlife

and humans. Black bears, deer, turkey are all native wildlife species. They have cohabitated for longer than we've been here. And, you know, it's not like it's an invasive species that are being brought in, that have been brought in. They're a native species. And, you know, native species find a way to create an equilibrium and to survive with each other versus an invasive species that throw that balance off. I truly think that with time and more access to bears as a resource, a lot of the controversy around this will dissipate. And the fact of the matter is, the population is growing.

To wrap this up, I want to ask Anthony how he feels to be in his position at such a critical moment in this conservation story. From a historical perspective, it just doesn't get any cooler, man. Like to be a part of the Teddy Roosevelt story and the Hulk Carrier stories and the Robert Bobos and the historical figures through time that have shaped our habitat and have shaped our history and to be part of the North American wildlife model and the recovery of one of the most. recognizable and charismatic species in the world, there's just nothing cooler than that. And to be a part of an eventual hunting season that comes back to Mississippi for the first time since those days is, man, that's just a flag on the moon kind of moment, you know. And it's, you know, it's kind of hard to be in this position without acknowledging all of those people that came, you know, the biologists that busted their behind for decades, you know, to kind of get us where we are.

And we're talking about the different timelines, you know, nobody that I work with have been able to see the first hunting seasons back again on those species. I think this is the last really, like, one of the greatest recovery stories and conservation stories in our state's history. And, man, it just does not get any cooler than that to be part of that next chapter, you know. Our history with our wildlife and our wild lands is complicated, but it has yielded some incredible success stories through the power of conservation. And I think we have a real shot at having another success. story with the Mississippi Black Bears. And believe me, the day that that hunting season gets opened up in Mississippi, I'll be somewhere doing a victory dance.

It's just too cool to not celebrate. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Greece and this country life. And I want to give a big shout out to Onex Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like this episode, share it with your friends and family this week. And stick around because there's a whole lot more on the way. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Felton. at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts.

Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut.

I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.