A Charred Life 
Environment
Bear With Me
Black bears have returned to Big Bend National Park, and our author is determined to find one.
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In one of those dazzling ironies possible only where bureaucracies flourish, the federal government has now declared the wolf an endangered species and is funding a program to reintroduce it to the American wilderness. Big Bend National Park isn’t currently on the list of sites scheduled to receive wolves, but a group in Richardson that calls itself the Mexican Wolf Coalition is urging such a program, apparently with the support of Governor Ann Richards. Ranchers and landowners are vehemently opposed, of course, and the reintroduction of the wolf has become a polarizing issue in Brewster County. But in the years since bears and wolves vanished, Brewster County has evolved into something quite different: The southern half of the county is now more dependent on tourism than on ranching.
When we traveled to the park in September, we knew that the odds were long against actually seeing a bear, but just knowing that it was a possibility made the search worthwhile. Monsoonlike rains had pelted the Big Bend for several weeks before we arrived. Normally, the best time to see a bear is early morning or late afternoon, when the weather is most pleasant and the animals are moving about hunting for food. But the rains had cooled the desert and assured such an abundance of succulent plants that a bear wouldn’t have to travel more than a few feet to find board and bed. Vegetation was so thick we could have stepped on a bear before seeing it.
The first afternoon, we hiked up Lost Mine Trail, a narrow switchback path that starts at the basin road and zigzags up a steep incline for 2.3 miles. At an altitude well above five thousand feet, it is a difficult climb, but there are a number of resting places, most of them with views of the cloud-covered peaks or deep green canyons, all of them shaded by a variety of juniper, oak, and pine trees. From the rocky summit at the end of the trail is a spectacular view across Pine Canyon to Lost Mine Peak. We didn’t spot any bear along the trail, but we did see a pile of bear scat, as it is called in scientific circles. The excrement, which we identified with the aid of a book purchased at park headquarters, was the size and shape of a small sausage and had been deposited on a flat rock beside the trail. The bear had recently digested a meal of piñon nuts, acorns, juniper berries, and some sort of purplish fruit.
Of all of the amazing things that a visitor notes about Big Bend National Park, the most astonishing is the constant juxtaposition of desert and mountains. The Chisos range is a temperate island surrounded by the vast Chihuahuan Desert: Rainfall in the park varies from about 5 inches a year near the river to as much as 25 inches in the high country. The diverse nature of the park became particularly apparent when we moved on into Pine Canyon.
To reach the canyon trail, we drove up a primitive road on the back side of Casa Grande, the enormous plume of rock that is the park’s most apparent feature. The road was hot and dusty, and it snaked through a stark landscape of sotol stalks, ocotillo, and occasional blooming lechuguilla and century plants to a clearing wide enough to park. From there we started out on foot up a steadily ascending trail, breathing hard and stopping frequently for water, a blinding sun in our eyes. After we had walked for about an hour, the trail narrowed into a heavily wooded canyon. At a still higher elevation, the temperature seemed to drop about fifteen degrees as the canyon walls swallowed up the afternoon. Through the crimson-edged leaves of bigtooth maples, sunlight dappled the trail, which was damp now and sometimes hard to detect in the shadows. Through the high branches of an enormous ponderosa pine, an acorn woodpecker carried some sort of strange grasshopper, shiny black with yellow trim, to her nest. At the head of the canyon, a spectacular waterfall plunged down a two-hundred-foot cliff. We sat for a while near the base of the fall, resting and talking about what to do next. We suspected that there were bears in this canyon—we had seen claw marks along the trail, scratched in the smooth cream-colored bark of a Texas madrone tree—and it was possible that a bear or two was hiding at that very moment in one of the dark-mouthed caves just above us on the canyon wall. But nobody volunteered to climb up and take a look.
In two and a half days of hiking and driving, we saw bear scat and claw marks, but the pesky animal itself eluded us. Our chances of seeing a bear, as it turned out, were better than the chance of a bear seeing us: Bears have notoriously poor eyesight but excellent senses of smell and hearing. Though the black bear is classified as a carnivore, it will eat almost anything, including grass, insects, rodents, fish, and garbage. A grown bear isn’t much taller than a St. Bernard—about 25 inches at the shoulders—but it can weigh up to three hundred pounds and is surprisingly fleet-footed. Unlike the bad-tempered grizzly, of which there are none in this part of the U.S., the black bear is unlikely to attack a person, the exception being a sow that believes her cubs are in danger. In the winter, bears look for windfalls—a boulder or a tree base will do—to make a den, and cubs are usually born in January or February, while the sow sleeps. By the time the new mother is ready to leave her den, the cubs are strong enough to follow. They will stay with her for about two years, then strike out on their own.
After 45 years of park protection and the elimination of grazing, the Chisos Mountains are today probably a more suitable habitat for bear than they were in the thirties. Nevertheless, it is comforting to realize that the bear returned without any additional help from mankind. This is a tribute to what park superintendent Rob Arnberger calls the Mexican connection. “It’s important that we have a reserve of bears to our south,” says Arnberger, who hopes that publicity generated by the bears’ return will revive interest in a sister park across the border in Mexico. Opening a sister park (apparently the idea of an international park is dead) has been discussed—and delayed—for years, in part because the Sierra del Carmen range is privately owned, and the Mexican government has shown no inclination to buy it.
The return of the Mexican black bear reminds us that Texas has been given a rare opportunity, one that isn’t likely to come our way again. The Big Bend is one of our most important wildlife areas, one of the few places in the state to preserve a complement of the wildlife that was here when the first settlers arrived. The park has a resident population of about two dozen mountain lions, the maximum it can sustain. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is studying plans to reintroduce the bighorn sheep to the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area, just beyond the park’s eastern border. The two bear cubs who created all the excitement in the summer of 1990 have left their mother and are traveling separately, and there is at least one other sow with a cub and maybe one or two more adult bears in the park.
The female who now seems destined to be the mother of the park’s resurgent population may have already bred again. The park has scheduled a seminar on black bears, taught by Eric Hellgren of Texas A&I University, on April 30 (registration deadline is March 30), by which time there may be several new toylike cubs in residence.
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