What Does a Louisiana Black Bear Technician Do?

This is probably the #1 blog I have wanted to post about. 

Y'all have read about my humble beginnings with USFWS as a volunteer and now I can finally share what it is like to work with a large carnivore. I am now a Louisiana black bear technician and my job this Summer is to build and bait hair snares in 2 Northern parishes in Louisiana and to collect the hair samples from them. We then send them back to the University of Tennessee to determine the individual black bears in the area. 

Louisiana black bears were once listed as a threatened subspecies of Eastern black bear in 1992, in March of 2016 they were delisted because their populations were rising.

LDWF and USFWS along with others were key to this success, but now the bears need to be monitored- that's where I come in. One way LDWF monitors the bears is non-invasive hair snaring. In the Summer, when bears are roaming around, we set up barbed wire fences around trees, about the size of a king sized bed. We then tie string as high as we can in the middle of that area to hang bait (a doughnut) in for the bears to want to come into that fence. The idea is to get the adults to "brush their hair" on the barbs for us to collect it for DNA. We check the snares once a week on the same day every week. Our group has around 170 snares we have to build, bait and check. We each get a field truck and an ATV to get to the remote locations of the sites- some are easier to get to than others as points are all chosen at random. 

I am not going to lie to you it is extremely hot, humid weather. I sweat so much I feel like I don't actually get dry until after I get home and shower.  I am bug bitten and super duper tore up from briars and barbed wire. I broke my thumb on the second day- around 9 in the morning and I still worked until 6 in the evening. I have a cast for it now but I can still do everything I could do before just tying things is hard and simple things like putting keys on a key ring is a challenge. Besides that the work is really rewarding. I like putting effort into things and seeing good results, especially checking locations off our list. Plus, this is just another day at the office I chose to be in- the great outdoors. It just comes with the job, the type of job I have always wanted. It makes me really excited to find out what could be my next job after this one since this only lasts until September. 

We have been working in teams of 2 these last few weeks for building but soon we will be on our own. I have seen a handful of water moccasins (AKA cotton mouth snakes), heard a rattle snake, and seen a bunch of wild hogs (males can be really mean) so when I am alone I will have to be alert. We do all have bear spray to carry on us when we check our snares and help is just a call away which makes me feel a lot better. I am not scared at all actually, I am very confident in that I know what to do and careful to make sure nothing bad happens in the first place. That's why we strap our ATV ramps down folks. 

I basically have been waking up at 4:30 AM and getting home around 5:30-6:00 PM for these long build days. We have a dead line to get all those snares built so we have been putting in some over time. There is also good things that I really enjoy about this job that you may not think of like when there are a lot of briars it is usually black berries so I get to eat those as I go when I want to. I do get to see a lot of wildlife while I am out building snares and riding around but unfortunately I haven't seen any bears yet. I am sure I will when I am out by myself carrying around doughnuts in my backpack am I right, haha. 

"He sends forth springs in the valleys;

They flow between the mountains;

They give drink to every beast of the field;

The wild donkeys quench their thirst.

Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell;

They lift up their voices among the branches"

-Psalm 104:10-12

-Nichole🐻