When you are in Florida bear country, you can see the signs. My friend, bear biologist Joseph Guthrie, taught me what to look for. Sometimes you can spot wide prints in sand or mud—if you are lucky enough to see them before a rainstorm erases the story. You can also learn to spot head-high claw marks, rubbed bark and bite marks on pine and cypress trees along bear trails.

When it is mating season, from spring to early summer, bears use straight-trunked trees to mark their territories and communicate with each other. A bear will walk up to a tree, stand on its hind legs and vigorously rub its back up and down on the bark, often reaching up above its head to claw and bite the trunk. When another bear comes by, it does the same thing, smelling who has been there and then adding its own mark.

Florida black bears rely on forests throughout the Florida Wildlife Corridor, spread across seven populations from Pensacola to Naples. There were once bears in every Florida county. Loss of forested habitat by development and roads has squeezed bears into the last remaining large forests. As development expands, these sub-populations are becoming more isolated. Florida’s biggest bear populations are around Apalachicola National Forest, Ocala National Forest and Big Cypress National Preserve, each with as many as 1,000 bears. The other four populations are much smaller, some with fewer than 100 bears. These populations are on their way to regional extinction. A main goal of the Florida Wildlife Corridor project is to connect and protect enough land so that all of Florida’s separate bear populations can be reunited as one.

I had an amazing opportunity to work with my team at Wildpath media on a blue-chip natural history film for National Geographic to raise awareness for Florida’s black bears. We spent a year using camera traps to film bears scratching on trees. First, we found a few trees with relatively fresh marks. Then, we set up cameras triggered by an invisible motion detector high on the tree. Finally, we waited. And waited. And waited. We set up in October not knowing that the bears would not come out of hibernation and look for mates until seven months later. By June, there were bears scratching on the trees weekly.

The tree in this photo is on a private ranch that borders the Big Cypress National Preserve. In addition to multiple video cameras pointed at the pine, I hid a second camera that was silently triggered by a motion detector. The bear in this photo is a female nicknamed Blondie for her lightly colored coat, common for the southernmost bears in America who don’t need coats as insulated as their cousins in Pennsylvania or Canada.

Blondie, who is a little over 5 feet tall, was a regular at this pine tree. She scratched so vigorously that she looked like she was dancing. Take note of the chewed and clawed bark two feet beyond her nose. That’s from an 8-foot-tall male bear who danced with the same tree, a hint that next summer Blondie might have a new litter of cubs in tow.

NOTES

HABITAT – NEAR BIG CYPRESS NATIONAL PRESERVE

SEASON – SUMMER

TIME OF DAY – 9:21 A.M.

SUBJECT – BLACK BEAR POPULATION