{"id":22468,"date":"2012-12-19T13:49:04","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T19:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=22468"},"modified":"2013-01-16T12:10:44","modified_gmt":"2013-01-16T18:10:44","slug":"how-drought-and-wildfire-could-bring-bears-back-to-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/12\/19\/how-drought-and-wildfire-could-bring-bears-back-to-texas\/","title":{"rendered":"How Drought and Wildfire Could Bring Bears Back to Texas"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo Courtesy of Ray Janiczek.<\/p>

A Black Bear spotted in Brewster County. Black bears in Texas are generally smaller than in other parts of the country.<\/p><\/div>\n

There are hardly any bears in Texas, but it hasn’t always been that way. Black bears used to roam the state from the Piney Woods of the east to the mountain ranges of the far west.<\/p>\n

Then American colonists arrived.<\/p>\n

Bear hunting was “part of the hunting culture that early Texans enjoyed,”\u00a0Texas Parks and Wildlife<\/a> Diversity Biologist Jonah Evens told StateImpact Texas. “Eventually we wiped them out completely from the state.”<\/p>\n

By the early 1900s there were no bears left. The nearest breeding populations remained across the border in Mexico.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then there were no bears in Texas for decades until they returned to Big Bend National Park<\/a>, I believe it was the early 80s,” Evans said.
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That Big Bend population in remained stable, but never expanded to other areas. In East Texas the occasional bear would wander in from Louisiana, but never stuck around to have bear babies. And that\u2019s how things stood until just a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n

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