SPRINGDALE, Wash. – There’s nothing fancy about the corrals wildlife biologists use to snag bear hair.
All it takes is two strands of barbed wire and a few trees that happen to have grown in convenient spots. In the middle, they make a pile of branches and small logs and soak it in something rancid. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife uses a mixture of cattle blood and fish oil.
It goes like this: A bear catches a whiff and decides it has to know more. It figures out that the stench is coming from the wood pile, so it climbs over or through the fence, paying no mind to the sharp barbs plucking off bits of its hair.
Once it discovers the odor was a ruse, the bear will leave. Its hair, however, will stay on the barbs until someone shows up to collect it.
The second corral that WDFW biologists Annemarie Prince and Healani Johnson checked Wednesday morning in the Huckleberry Mountains had more action than the first. The wood pile in the middle of the corral had been knocked around. So had the motion-activated camera, strapped to a nearby tree.
Johnson opened the camera and checked the recent footage. Before long, she found video of a bear nosing at the camera and climbing into the corral.
When she glanced at the wire, she saw that the barbs had done their job.
“There’s quite a bit of tufts,” Johnson said. “Pretty exciting.”
The corral is one of a few dozen that WDFW staff are monitoring this summer for a broader study of the black bear population in this part of the state.
Hair samples will help them develop an estimate of black bear population density in the area, which covers part of game management unit 121 in western Stevens County.
It’s the latest iteration of WDFW’s push to learn more about black bear densities. Since 2019, the agency has focused hair snagging efforts in specific areas of the state. At the end of the last sampling season, biologists had pulled nearly 15,000 hair samples from more than 600 corrals across 17 study areas, according to the most recent statewide black bear density monitoring report.
Once the samples are gathered, WDFW staff go through each strand of hair and every bit of remote camera footage. The best samples – ones that have roots and that biologists are relatively certain came from a bear – go to a lab for DNA analysis.
The analysis can identify the genotype on an individual hair, which gives WDFW a way to distinguish between individual bears. That can help biologists confirm the number of individual bears that visited a specific site and identify how often the same bears are coming back. All of that information goes into a mathematical model that considers probabilities and other factors to estimate population density – the number of bears that exist in a given area.
In 2019, after corrals were set in game management unit 117 in Stevens and Pend Oreille counties, the result was an estimate of about 31.1 bears per 100 square kilometers, the third highest estimate since the project began. The highest estimate came last year, when three units in southeast Washington were estimated to have 34.8 bears per 100 square kilometers. The lowest number came from a unit in Clallam County: 5.6 bears per 100 square kilometers.
These estimates help WDFW officials decide what they should do with black bear hunting regulations. It also fills in gaps in their knowledge about the species.
Prince, who has worked in northeast Washington since 2013, said the agency doesn’t have any concerns about black bears here, but that they could always use more information.
“I think we have a robust, healthy bear population,” she said. “But we also don’t know what the density is.”
This summer’s work is the first time the project has come to unit 121, which stretches roughly from the border of the Spokane Indian Reservation north to Kettle Falls.
Prince said she’s curious how the numbers will compare to the area they studied in 2019, which lies just to the east. The mountains outside of Springdale are more dry and the forest is generally younger – due in part to the massive Carpenter Road fire of 2015.
In all, Prince and Johnson are monitoring 10 corrals. They checked eight on Tuesday and saved two that were farther from the rest for Wednesday.
The first one was high up a narrow and overgrown logging road. The wires were stretched in a square around four trees. Prince checked each barb, holding a piece of paper under them to help her spot the hair.
Johnson went for the camera. She doesn’t watch every video – primarily, she wants to ensure the camera is on and working – but she usually scrolls through a few videos to see what’s been happening. There were no recent bears on this camera, but there were turkeys, a cougar and a rain-soaked skunk.
They found a couple of hairs dangling from separate barbs, likely from the skunk and cougar. They collected them anyway. Prince said they’ll likely get thrown out once someone has reviewed all the camera footage and is absolutely certain the samples are non-ursine.
The second site was in a thicker patch of forest a few ridges away. While Johnson scrolled through the camera footage, Prince prepared the hair sample envelopes. Each one needs to be labeled with the date, the location, the exact barb that caught the hair – for example, the ninth barb on side A – and a few other items. Then she folded the envelopes over the wire next to their corresponding barbs.
After she was done with the camera, Johnson used tweezers to take hair from the fence and drop it in the envelopes. Prince moved on to filling out a data sheet. They worked in silence for a few minutes, filling 10 envelopes before moving on to the final part of the job.
The corrals will be out for a few more weeks, there to pluck hair from any curious animal. That means the pile of wood still needs to stink. Johnson had done the honors at the first site, so Prince grabbed the brown jug this time. She gave the wood pile a fresh pour of the cattle blood and fish oil mixture.
They’ve both smelled much worse. Still, Prince poured carefully.
“You know it when you’ve got some on your shoes,” she said.
