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State Receives Valuable Bear Data

November 23, 2009 - AUGUSTA -- Back in 2008, the Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife began requesting a bit of help from bear hunters who were tagging their bruins.

Can you spare a tooth?

On Friday — after the second year of that information-gathering initiative — the DIF&W announced that 1,037 hunters, or 38 percent of all successful hunters, complied with that request during 2008, providing the department with the kind of valuable data they’ve been seeking.

Among the interesting facts gleaned thus far: The oldest bear taken in 2008 was a 28-year-old female, and the oldest male was 20 years old.

Older bears make up a smaller proportion of the harvest, according to a DIF&W news release. About one-third of the bears killed were 3 years old or older.

Hunters can find out how old their 2008-harvested bear was by going to the bear hunting page of the DIF&W’s Web site at www.mefishwildlife.com.

According to a DIF&W release, bear biologists expect to receive this year’s bear teeth from tagging stations by the end of the year and will have that data posted on the Web site next summer.

Jen Vashon, a wildlife biologist who serves as the DIF&W’s bear expert, said the data received will help the department learn a lot about the state’s population of black bears.

“The reason we collected the teeth is just to give us another way to track bear numbers,” Vashon said. “What’s nice about this is it comes from a statewide sample … We can’t have a telemetry study to cross the state. That’s one way we track the population — having a sample of the popula-tion that we monitor intensively [through] the telemetry. This allows us to estimate the number of animals across the state through the harvest.”

The state has a long-running telemetry project in which bears in three study areas — one in northern Maine, one Down East, and one in Bradford — are fitted with radio collars and regularly monitored by biologists. Vashon said between 75 and 90 bears are currently being studied in the telemetry project.

The new data gleaned from the donated teeth will begin to produce fruit in coming years, Vashon said.

“What it’s good for is it helps track trends. You need three to five years of data to come up with a baseline, first,” Vashon said. “Once we get that baseline, every year onward will help us monitor the trends. We will be able to continue to track and see if the population is increasing or de-creasing.”

If the tooth information proves as helpful as Vashon thinks it might, it may also give the state the ability to tinker with or scale back the expensive telemetry work.

“If it turns out, the longshot of the whole thing is we might find that it may be a more affordable way of tracking the bear population than telemetry-based studies,” Vashon said. “We may need to keep a portion of the telemetry study but curtail it even further than we have.”

By John Holyoke
Bangor Daily News Staff 11/21/09

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