Field Guide: Black Bear
On frontiers and "true hunter fashion"
A programming note: the three-times-per-month schedule has been a struggle to maintain; moving forward, you can expect two newsletters a month: one full essay, like this one, and a second newsier round-up. I am, though, looking to grow the newsletter—and I’m currently looking for a collaborator who enjoys managing social media. If that’s you, please reach out. Now, on with today’s main show: the last of the Southern predators, the black bear.
The single most famous moment in bear-human relations occurred in the overgrown forests along the southern Mississippi River in 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt failed to find a bear that he was willing to kill.
Roosevelt’s guide, Holt Collier, at least managed to tie up a bear on the president’s behalf. But the president deemed the beast too weak and emaciated to slaughter—thereby inspiring a toymaker to invent the Teddy Bear. What is less often recounted is that the sad old bear was still ultimately dispatched. After a knife to the ribs, the corpse was slung atop a horse and carried back to camp, to be butchered and served at meals.
If the Teddy Bear story has been sanitized and romanticized, that does not diminish its importance. This was a cultural pivot point: just a few decades earlier, the majority of Americans would have known wild bears as a threat to their crop and their livelihood, as a beast antithetical to a child’s plaything. At the dawn of the twentieth century, though, with the nation rapidly urbanizing, bears had become something more abstract—something potentially cuddly.
As I noted in my last dispatch, I have been inadvertently assembling a bestiary here, a series of essays examining the apex predators of the South. There are imperiled species—the red wolf, the cougar—and there are creatures like the alligator and the coyote that have so thrived that they’re now declared nuisances. The bear—and the black bear, specifically, which is the sole ursine species that lives in the South—is an odd case, in that it is a nuisance and imperiled at once. Taxonomists have identified sixteen different subspecies of the black bear. Onl one of those sixteen subspecies prompts any concern from conservationists: the Louisiana black bear, Ursus americanus luteolus, the same beast that Roosevelt set out to kill.1
Gloria Dickie’s excellent new book, Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future points out that bears hold a special place in human consciousness. Almost every culture whose home overlaps with bear habitat tells stories of some part-bear and part-human being. Dickie notes that the American black bear is the species you’re likely to conjure if you’re asked to picture a bear: “short black fur, pale snout, a lean build, humpless back, and round ears.”
While societies that persecute bears are the exception rather than the rule, it’s the predecessors of “Western” culture—Roman and Christian traditions especially—that treated bears the worst. That influence seemed to carry over to the United States, where the black bear, like every other large mammal, was killed indiscriminately.
Today, though, this bear is a rare happy case: it’s remained quite abundant—the world’s most bountiful by far, as numerous as the seven other ursine species combined. Officials believe that 1,900 black bears live in Great Smokey Mountain National Park. Nearby, in Asheville, N.C., the frequent presence of bears has stoked bitter controversies. As far as I can tell, what has allowed the bear to thrive is its dietary adaptability. In other words: while wolves need to kill to survive, bears are a different kind of predator, happy to live off our trash.
The Louisiana black bear was identified as early as 1821, when in his bestiary Carnivora, the biologist Griffith called this the “yellow bear,” likely due to its yellowish muzzle. Compared to other black bears, this population features long, flat, narrow skulls with outsized molars. The subspecies lives across a wide expanse of the South, from Texas to Mississippi.
I’m not sure how many Louisiana black bears were left in 1902, but given the difficulties Roosevelt had finding one, there could not have been many. Thirty years later, Mississippi biologists could find less than a dozen in their state and quickly pushed to outlaw bear hunting. It was not until 1992, after a retired Louisiana Cadillac dealer sued the federal government, that the Louisiana black bear was officially listed as an endangered species.
Officially, per the U.S. government, Ursus americanus luteolus was doomed by “the historical modification and reduction of habitat, the reduced quality of remaining habitat due to fragmentation, and the threat of future habitat conversion and human-related mortality.” It’s an indictment of what we’ve done to this bear’s homeland along the Mississippi River, which has become an in-between world. It’s insufficiently inhabited to provide a steady supply of trash-as-food—but it’s not very wild, either. The extent of deforestation down here is visible from space now: the river’s former floodplain is a brown band, all corn and soybean fields, which doesn’t offer much for a bear.
Fortunately, in the decades since the bear was listed as endangered, even along the southern Mississippi River there has been a positive trend: hundreds of thousands of acres of marginal farmland have been converted back to bottomland hardwood forest. By 2016, the amount of bear habitat had expanded by 430 percent. There were four stable Louisana subpopulations of bears by then—two in the Atchafalaya Basin, one in the Tensas Basin, and one in the “Three Rivers Complex,” where the Atchafalaya, Red, and Mississippi rivers meet—and some individuals were moving between these zones. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided this was enough progress to “delist” the bear. State biologists decided to monitor the bear for another seven years, though in 2022, as that period came to an end, Louisiana legislators began to push to open a bear-hunting season.
Despite the gains, the total Louisiana black bear population is around one percent of its historic maximum; this subspecies lives in around two percent of its historic range. Several Louisianans and Louisiana-based nonprofits sued the government in 2020, seeking a relisting of the Louisiana black bear. The case, which is still making its way through court, hinges in part on genetics. Between 1958 and 1967, an estimated 254 bears were trucked down from northern Minnesota and Manitoba and released in the South. In the mountains of Arkansas and Missouri, this wound up becoming “the most successful re-introduction of bears in the world,” according to biologists. Some imported bears were released in Louisiana, too—which complicates the recovery program by muddying the genetic waters. The northern bears did not belong to the endangered subspecies. The Upper Atchafalaya bears, specifically, seem to now constitute a group genetically separate from the subspecies, so if the bear populations are interbreeding, that could be diluting the Ursus americanus luteolus genes.
This bear is a tough case. Count me among those who believe that America needs more hunters. And, as I’ve written about before in Southlands, policing the hazy boundaries between species and subspecies doesn’t strike me as the most forward-looking approach. The presence of genetically diverse bears in Louisiana is almost certainly good for the species’ long-term survival, helping the species adapt in a changing world; besides, it’s not all that clear that Louisiana’s bears constitute a group distinguishable from Florida’s ursine population. On the other hand, the sole recent bear season in the hunt-happy South was something of a fiasco: nearly three hundred bears were killed over two days in Florida in 2015—so many that the state never reopened the season.
There’s a little-told sequel to the Teddy Bear story: five years later, Roosevelt tried again. He traveled south by steamboat, this time to the Louisiana bottomlands, for a hunt he recounted in an essay published in Scribner’s.
This time he managed to corner and shoot a bear. “I knew my bullet would go true,” he wrote, “and, sure enough, at the crack of the rifle the bear stumbled and fell forward.” She was not killed enough for Roosevelt’s taste, since in her last few minutes she could have struck one of his expensive hounds. So he “fired again, breaking the spine at the root of the neck; and down went the bear stark dead, slain in the canebrake in true hunter fashion.”
True hunter fashion—what a phrase. But what does it mean? There are plenty of reasons to admire Roosevelt; he understood that if he wanted to kill animals, then he needed to make sure the animals had somewhere to live. He preserved hundreds of millions of acres of land, as national parks and national forests and national refuges. Still, I can’t help but cringe at the costume he wore when he rode the train south to Mississippi in 1902: a coat of fringed buckskin. He was cosplaying at being a man on the frontier.
Roosevelt was obsessed with the frontier, which he wrote about in several books of revisionist history. He decided that the American character had been forged out there, in that dangerous place, where white people had to battle against the continent’s original inhabitants: “A race of peaceful, unwarlike farmers would have been helpless before such foes as the red Indians.” By Roosevelt’s day, though, the frontier was gone, which left Roosevelt worried that Americans, lacking “red Indian foes,” might turn soft. He hunted in part to be the kind of warrior white man that he thought constituted a true American.
Roosvelt’s essay in Scribner’s captures a peculiar schizophrenia. Before he described the hunt, the president spent a few paragraphs extolling the beauty of plantations that had already replaced most of the forests in the floodplain along the Mississippi River. Only after this praise does he turn to his backwoods adventure. (“Beyond the end of cultivation towers the great forest.”) The essay offers a reminder that there were always two sides to the frontier. Roosevelt wanted both: he wanted to clear the land and make money, but he also wanted to hold onto a few slivers of forests—just enough space for the thrilling violence of frontier living to be retained. Perhaps it’s time for us to rethink the why and how of preserving public lands.
The questions we’re asking these days about Louisiana’s bears are quite technical: How much habitat do they have? What’s in their genes? How many bears is enough? Ultimately, though, there’s a more philosophical question we’ll have to answer: what is the right human relationship with a bear?
In explaining why we need to hunt Louisiana’s bears, one state senator has noted that there are too many “challenges [to] passing the legacy of hunting and enjoying the outdoors to our youth.” He describes the return of bears is one more threat to this local tradition: the beasts are now so prominent in some places that “a lot of fathers and grandfathers don’t feel safe taking their children and grandchildren in the woods.” That strikes me as a strange turn to true hunter fashion. What are the woods without the big, bad bear?
If you want to see them…
Despite their apparent nuisance status, I’ve never managed to see a bear in Louisiana, even when I’ve visited a national wildlife refuge in the Lower Atchafalaya Basin that was built in part for the bear’s sake. You may have better luck far to the north, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Further reading
Dickie’s Eight Bears is a great read, though it deals with Southern bears only in passing. For a more Southern-centric experience, pick up William Faulkner’s Big Woods, which contains an accessible version of his masterpiece novella “The Bear.” (If you’re ready for a harder but still rewarding slog, then pick up Go Down, Moses, which embeds the novella within a longer, tangled exploration of Mississippi.) And for a different perspective on bears in the South, check out this essay by wildlife ecologist Rae Wynn-Grant, who considers the Black bears told by enslaved people on Georgia and South Carolina plantations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In much of the Southeast, the black bears are classified as simply Ursus americanus—the American black bear. There is one other Southern subspecies, Ursus americanus floridanus, the Florida black bear, though as we’ll see, some biologists believe that all of the Deep South bears should be grouped together.