Gary Alt: Pennsylvania Bear Whisperer
Dr. Gary Alt has made a living of confronting large angry mammals in close quarters – and not just the politicians, but bears and whitetail deer, too.
““Oh, I’ve been in over 500 occupied bear dens, and I’ve been run over by bears in dens about three times.” ”
Alt served over 20 years as the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s lead bear biologist, where he helped oversee a recovery of Ursa americanus from about 3,000 bears to 15,000 and the expansion of their range from about a dozen counties to over 60. Following on his success with bears, he was asked by then-Governor Tom Ridge to take on the demanding role of the lead whitetail biologist in a state where deer hunting is on the same level as God and country.
Alt’s wildlife management philosophy might best be described as “tough love” or taking short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain. That strategy won him some diehard disciples as well as some fiery skeptics, and Alt was not afraid to engage in public debate in town halls and legislative hearings. On one occasion, federal law enforcement, scanning a room full of armed and passionate hunters, felt the need to pull him aside to review self-defense protocol.
“There are a number of times in my career where I had [to make] a decision where I was up against the either the Board of Commissioners or Governor's office,” says Alt. “I didn't make a practice out of being disrespectful but I would be really honest.” The numbers speak for themselves, and these days Pennsylvania hunters are enjoying record bear harvests.
I caught up with Gary on a recent late spring afternoon to learn more about the lifecycle of black bears, his management of the species, and their rebound in the Keystone State. Below are my questions followed by his answers.
52 Week Season: What the state of the bear population when you started, and why was the situation so dire?
Alt in a bear den
Dr. Gary Alt: You have to go back and look, how did we lose them in the first place? From the time they landed at Plymouth Rock to about 1900, forestland was converted to agriculture in a massive way, and bears need forest to live. You had a quarter of a million bear hunters concentrated in a very small area and only a couple of thousand bears.
We knew from modeling that if you start shooting much over 20% of the bears in a year the population is going to be going down. In 1974 and ’75 before I started, the harvest rates were right around 20%. But in ’76, they shot about 33% in less than 12 hours, and all hell broke loose. It changed everything. We knew there was going to be a problem if we didn’t figure out a way to spread those bears out and slow this down.
How did you recover the population?
Well, I didn’t do it, the bears did it.
Ha, fair enough, but how did you help them along?
First, we created a separate bear license -- at that time, anybody who got a hunting license could go bear hunting. A lot of people said, “Oh my gosh, I'm not gonna drop $10 just for a once in a lifetime chance of even seeing a bear, let alone shooting it.” So the number of hunters dropped to 100,000.
Second, we also closed down many of those counties that bears were just starting to spread into. Bears have a suitable range over a massive area but we were shooting them in their core area. Let them build up! It's kind of like pouring pancake batter on a grill, and it starts spreading all over the place; it just expands. That’s what happened: they pushed out.
Lastly, we helped them out by hauling pregnant females into other areas of the state like southwestern Pennsylvania, where there were very few bears, and releasing them.
Did the bear population take hold in other parts of the state given the chance?
At first we would take females but they would try to come home, and some of them did over 100 miles away. A lot of them got killed on highways. If you get a female in heat, somehow they’re going to get bred and will move like crazy across counties looking for a male to breed. We said there’s got to be another way to do this.
So, we took them down when they were pregnant, and when you drop them off in the winter, they’ll settle and find a suitable den site within a couple of miles. They can’t go anywhere in the spring -- the cubs can’t go anywhere until April -- and by about the time the cubs are able to walk, that’s their home range.
Alt with a couple of cubs
When setting a hunting season, do you factor in when females are breeding?
Females only breed every other year. They breed in the summer and then they give birth in January, and then the cubs leave then den in April and stay with the mother the whole first year.
By having hunting seasons at the time we did, we found out that about half of the pregnant females were denned prior to hunting season. The way we have things set up with a hunting season at that time of year helps save a lot of the pregnant females.
When was the hunting season?
We tried late in the year one year -- December 17 -- but they really hammered the mothers with yearlings, and it’s pretty rough weather by then. So, we went back to the Monday before Thanksgiving, but we just needed to control the number of hunters.
Nowadays you can hunt bears throughout parts of the archery season, muzzleloader season, and rifle season for deer, as well as the special. So it’s going on anywhere from the middle of October all the way through until the middle of December.
When does a bear usually go into its den?
Pregnant females are usually going in late October through November. The mothers with cubs of the year are pretty late, and the last ones are probably the males.
But the timing of when they go in the den is quite variable. In years when there's abundant food, they stay active later; but in years where there's a scarcity of food, they’ll den much earlier.
Even if you go into the den to look at them when it's really cold, they’re pretty lethargic and they'll look at you. You go in there on a day that's 50 degrees -- good luck! You're going to come out of the other end, crawling backwards really fast.
So you’ve crawled into a few bear dens?
Oh, I've been in over 500 occupied bear dens, and I've been run over by bears in dens about three times. I’ve had them jump right on me!
Had my pants torn off once. I thought she was going to get me for sure -- I could see her raising her right front paw to swing, and I cringed and I thought, Oh boy, this is going to hurt. And I heard a swing and I heard a riiiiip, and all of a sudden my legs from my knee down got really cold. I turned around and she's got my pants in her mouth. I had these old bell-bottom corduroys, and when she swung she thought the whole thing probably was my leg and ripped my pants off!
I’ve had times when I’ve fallen in from above, and she’s on my chest sniffing my face, deliberately not hurting me. You just you know to stay quiet.
Amazing. What do bears mostly eat and what’s the ideal habitat?
Mainly forest with some agriculture interspersed, because these guys become hyperphagic in the fall -- they'll eat over 20,000 calories a day. If they don't have acorns and beechnuts, they’ll head for these farms and go into those cornfields and just gorge themselves. They can move 50 miles to go find a cornfield, and put on 100 pounds in two months.
It sounds like the habitat has improved quite a bit for them in recent decades?
Yes, both in Pennsylvania and the surrounding states the bear populations have increased. There are eight species of bear in the world, and the total number of bears on this planet is about 1.2 million. Nine hundred thousand of those are American black bear. There's only two bears on the planet that are not in trouble -- the American black bear and the brown bear.
The black bears have recovered because so much of forest that got stripped down in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s -- and we kind of reached a peak of destruction around 1900, but then they stopped farming. And then, just through succession, the forest started to grow back into those farms. But in the second half the 1900s with massive reforestation in the eastern United States, you’ve seen deer, bear, and turkey and more species do much better. The ag species -- the bobwhite quail and rabbit -- just suffered.
Speaking of deer, so after managing bear, you jumped over to whitetail deer. How was that experience?
I felt like it was just a couple of us against the world. Gov. Ridge basically gave me much more control over the deer program than anybody has ever had before, and I was allowed to help really make the decisions and walk it through the policy process.
One of the things we wanted to do was bring the deer herd down to where we could balance it with a habitat. We were killing our bucks before they grew up -- 90% of all the bucks killed just left their mother six months before. It was a culture where they [hunters] just wanted to get their buck and they didn't care about anything else.
I was frequently in front of very large crowds that averaged over 500 people at night, and I would hold up a little antler rack about eight inches wide and would say, does this looks familiar? That would get a lot of laughs. Then I would say, you want to know what happens when you let this guy live another year? And I show an eight pointer with a 12-13 inch spread. Then they want to let him go another year! And then I’d show them that if you let them live another year, now you're looking at 16-18 inches.
The Game Commission voted 4-3 for point restrictions. That was the most contentious thing -- I mean, people literally threatened to kill me. But once they had one year of it, the following fall when they saw all those eight pointers show up for the first time, and it was like, Hey this thing works!
Is there anything like the deer hunting culture in Pennsylvania?
Deer hunting is a tradition that is just immeasurable. It's like religion. I think it occurs maybe only in Michigan and Wisconsin the way it does in Pennsylvania -- those are the only two other states.
In Pennsylvania, the deer population got down to probably less than 10,000 in the whole state [in the early 1900s], and in just a few places the big woods areas of north central Pennsylvania and the Poconos. Most people in Pennsylvania couldn't hunt them anywhere except if they went to north-central Pennsylvania. And so they established this tradition in the early 1900s where they had camps they went to.
The deer populations recovered first in the North, and the traditions were established in the North, but as decades went by, the habitat became suitable and really fantastic in the southern parts of the states. The deer in the southern parts of state were growing bigger and having nicer antlers than they were at deer camp. But they had a camp because they wanted to go to camp with their father and their grandfather and keep the tradition going.
In many other states, it's a strong culture, but in Pennsylvania -- Oh my God!
