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A mountain goat's GPS collar sent a mortality signal during the winter of 2006. Six months later, the signal started moving again.

Kevin White, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist who had collared the goat that fall near the Meade Glacier, could not retrieve the body or the collar through deep snow. He planned to recover it in summer when conditions allowed.

The following August, White flew over the area scanning for the signal. Nothing. The collar had either malfunctioned or moved beyond the receiver's three-to-five-mile range. Six weeks later, he was in the same area and suddenly picked up the signal again. He and pilot Lynn Bennett circled but could not see anything through the thick alders below. A couple weeks after that, the signal appeared again from a different location.

White was completely perplexed. A dead goat's collar does not move between flights.

On October 4, he tracked the signal to an alpine plateau and looked down from the aircraft. A black bear was crossing the open ground wearing a brightly colored GPS collar.

White knew there were no biologists collaring black bears anywhere in the area. His first thought was that a Canadian researcher had collared a bear in the Yukon or British Columbia and it had wandered to the coast. Then he looked at the collar frequency and matched it to his own records. It was the dead goat's collar. The bear had scavenged the carcass sometime during the summer, and while pulling at the goat's neck and head, had slipped its own head through the collar loop. The collar, sized for a mountain goat's neck, fit the bear well enough to stay on.

The GPS unit was still recording. White downloaded the stored locations and suddenly had a detailed movement record of a black bear that nobody had intended to study. The data showed the bear crossing the Meade Glacier four times, a two-and-a-half-mile sheet of ice that most people would not cross without crampons and a rope. It showed the bear visiting a rocky nunatak, an island of exposed rock surrounded by glacier ice on all sides. It showed the bear descending into remote valleys on the far side of the icefield and returning. For more than a year, White tracked the bear using equipment designed, funded, and deployed for a completely different species.

The accidental collar swap was not the strangest multi-species event from White's research area. In a separate incident, a radio-collared wolf killed a radio-collared mountain goat, and the goat's carcass was later scavenged by a radio-collared wolverine. Three collared animals connected by a single kill. White said the ability to document species interaction in that level of detail was a unique feature of running studies on multiple species in the same landscape.

A mountain goat study in the coast mountains of Alaska accidentally became a black bear study because a bear ate the research subject and put on its equipment. The bear did not know it was wearing a collar. It did not know it was transmitting locations to a biologist who had no budget, no permit, and no intention of studying black bears that year. It crossed a glacier four times wearing a dead goat's tracking device while a man in an airplane followed the signal and learned more about black bear movement on the Juneau Icefield than anyone had documented before, entirely by accident, because a bear stuck its head through a loop of nylon and kept walking.

Source: Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Wildlife News / ADF&G Mountain Goat Research, Juneau Access Road Corridor.

A huge win for wild pig eradication efforts at Land Between the Lakes!

USDA APHIS Wildlife Services recently completed an extended season of aerial wild pig removal operations at Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area (LBL), removing 1,802 wild pigs from the Kentucky-Tennessee area.

Using helicopters equipped with FLIR (thermal imaging) technology and aerial removal equipment, crews significantly reduced the wild pig population. Follow-up surveys showed an estimated 90% decrease in wild pig numbers!

Winter removal efforts occurred from January through March 2026. The focus was primarily on female pigs, which travel in groups called sounders, that are easier to locate from the air than lone individuals.

Trapping efforts will continue until all remaining wild pigs are removed. USDA APHIS Wildlife Services, Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife, and Land Between the Lakes remain committed to the complete eradication of wild pigs at LBL and throughout Kentucky.

With wild pig numbers greatly reduced, hunters should see improved opportunities for deer and turkey hunting throughout LBL! Reducing wild pig populations helps protect native wildlife, conserve habitat, and preserve outdoor recreation opportunities for future generations.

As always, if you see something, say something at http://squealonpigs.com

📸: USDA-APHIS-Wildlife Services

It’s worth being aware of the new cases in Texas and New Mexico, and understanding the history, signs, and management of the New World Screwworm.

Wildlife Monitoring and Management for New World Screwworm - Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service How Texas can monitor, detect and report signs of New World screwworm infestation to help protect both urban and rural wildlife.

In the early 1980s, a Pennsylvania bear biologist named Gary Alt carried an orphaned black bear cub into a winter den, placed it beside a sleeping wild mother, and walked out. The mother woke up in the spring raising one more cub than she had given birth to. She never knew the difference.

Then Alt tried it outside the den, in spring, and the mother smelled the strange cub and killed it.

That failure is what led to the Vicks VapoRub.
Alt was the black bear biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission for twenty-seven years. During that time, he expanded the state's bear population from roughly three thousand to nearly fifteen thousand animals. He also dealt with a problem that every bear state faces. Orphaned cubs. A mother bear gets hit by a car, gets shot during season, gets killed in a management action, and leaves behind cubs that are too young to survive alone. The standard options were captive rearing or euthanasia. Alt wanted a third option. He wanted to give the orphan to a wild mother who was already raising her own.

The biology said it should not work. A black bear mother identifies her cubs by scent. She licks them after birth, and the chemical signature of her saliva marks them as hers. If she encounters a cub that does not carry her scent, she treats it as a threat or an intruder. Outside the den, in the active season, a mother bear that smells a strange cub will reject it. In some cases, she kills it. Alt learned this the hard way.

Inside the den was different. A hibernating mother is in a reduced metabolic state. Her senses are dampened. Her aggression is lower. Her discrimination between her own cubs and a stranger's is weaker. Alt tested the theory by opening a winter den, placing an orphaned cub beside the sleeping mother's existing litter, and backing away. The mother did not wake. The orphan nestled against her body alongside her biological cubs. When the family emerged in the spring, the mother was raising all of them. The orphan had been absorbed.

The technique worked reliably in the den. But orphaned cubs do not always appear in January. Sometimes they show up in April or May, after the mothers are already active and mobile and operating with full sensory awareness. Alt needed a way to introduce orphans to awake, alert mothers without the mother detecting the scent mismatch that would trigger rejection or killing.

He tested two approaches. In the first, he treed a mother bear and her cubs using dogs, released the orphan into the trees, and kept the mother separated from all the cubs for two to seven hours. The extended contact between the orphan and the biological cubs during the separation appeared to transfer enough shared scent that when the mother returned, she accepted the group without identifying the newcomer. The orphans were accepted.

In the second method, Alt sedated the mother, smeared Vicks VapoRub in her nostrils, and placed the orphan with her while she was unconscious. When the sedation wore off, the menthol overwhelmed her olfactory system. She could not distinguish the orphan's scent from her own cubs' scent because she could not smell anything except eucalyptus and camphor. By the time the Vicks wore off, the orphan had been in contact with the mother and siblings long enough that the scent lines had blurred. The orphans were accepted.

Alt later refined the technique further. He found that simply rubbing Vicks VapoRub on the orphan cub, without sedating the mother, was enough to inhibit aggression during introduction. The menthol on the cub's fur masked the foreign scent long enough for the mother to begin treating it as part of the group.

One Pennsylvania mother that supplemented her diet with garbage raised six cubs through the summer, including two orphans Alt had placed with her. Six cubs from a single sow is an extraordinary litter by any measure. The mother did not distinguish between the four she had birthed and the two that a biologist had carried in from somewhere else and smeared with cold medicine.

Lynn Rogers, the Minnesota bear biologist whose long-term research we referenced in the Bear 56 post, confirmed and expanded on Alt's work. Rogers published a framework in 1985 describing four options for orphaned cubs: returning them to their own mothers, introducing them to foster mothers, leaving them alone or transporting them to favorable areas, and raising them in captivity for later release. He noted that mothers with cubs would readily accept strange cubs in dens and sometimes outside dens under certain conditions. The den introduction, Rogers wrote, was the cleanest option. The mother's reduced state during hibernation made acceptance almost automatic.

The technique is still used today. In February 2020, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries placed an orphaned cub, rescued by a dog that had carried it home in its mouth, with a wild foster mother nursing three cubs of her own. Virginia's wildlife center maintains GPS-collared female bears specifically so they can locate denning mothers when an orphan needs placement.

Conservation officers track the collar, listen for cub sounds in the den, assess whether the mother has capacity for an additional cub, and make the placement. The mothering instinct is just very strong in most animals, wildlife biologist Bill Bassinger told reporters. Generally, most females will take the young back, even after it has been handled by humans.

A black bear mother that would kill a strange cub on sight in May will adopt it without question in February if you put it beside her while she is sleeping. A black bear mother that would kill a strange cub on sight in May will adopt it without question in May if you rub enough Vicks VapoRub on the cub to overwhelm her nose for an hour. The difference between a dead orphan and a living one is timing, temperature, and a two-dollar tube of menthol ointment from a drugstore.

Gary Alt figured that out in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania with a sedated bear, a jar of Vicks, and an orphaned cub that had nowhere else to go. The technique he developed has been used in bear states across the country for forty years. Every spring, somewhere in the Appalachians or the Rockies or the North Woods, a wildlife officer opens a den, places a cub beside a sleeping mother, and walks away knowing that the mother will wake up in April and count one more mouth to feed without ever questioning where it came from.

Source: Alt, G.L. (1984). "Cub Adoption in the Black Bear." Journal of Mammalogy 65(3). / Rogers, L.L. (1985). "Aiding the Wild Survival of Orphaned Bear Cubs." Wildlife Society Bulletin. / North American Bear Center / Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

The Old Man and his Farm

Four years ago a dart thrown at a map landed a friend and I in a small town in the midwest. Four gobblers in a yard lead us to knocking on the door. Knock Knock Knock… three steps back, stand straight, shoulders back, slight smile… like I’ve done a thousand times before. An old man shuffles to the screen door, favoring his right side with obvious signs of a previous stroke. “Yeaaahhhhhh?” he hollered, as if to say, why the hell are you interrupting my coffee and westerns. “Well sir, we came up here from Tennessee to hunt turkeys, and we couldn’t help but notice you have four big ones in your yard.” He replied.. “You sure drove a long ways to shoot some turkeys….. come on in.” And so it began. The stroke had impaired his speech to where he was hard to understand. The first year I understood 50 % of what he said, and just nodded and grinned to the other 50%. The second year I was up to 60%, and by the fourth year I could understand dang near everything he said. I came up for a week every fall for deer and again in the spring for turkeys. He loved the company and no matter how tired I was I spent every break between hunts drinking coffee, talking about that day’s topic, and ordering whatever he had decided he needed from the internet since the last time he had seen me. No matter what I was there hunting, the midday talks always began the same.. “Welllllll how many did ya get?”
The soil was black. The kind that produces 300 bushel an acre corn, massive antlers, and long spurs. I got to go toe to toe with some giants and made some hell of some memories.
The old man was 81, born in November of 1944, right where we had found him 8 decades later. He passed away in January from complications after a surgery. He didn’t have kids, so his siblings and their kids handle matters of the farm now. I was able to go back for a turkey hunt and spend what will likely be, the last time on his farm.
The drive to the little town seemed longer and when I turned onto his road my jaw dropped. Was I on the right road? The neighboring farm, what was big old growth woods and beautiful clover fields, was completely up rooted and lined with the biggest dirt moving equipment money can buy. Progress, economical growth, expansion… whatever you want to call it. Where the most game per acre that I’ve ever seen once lived, was now barren and strewn with hundred foot high mounds of dirt. After all… you have got to have the right dirt and a sturdy foundation for multi story apartment buildings. A year from now the apartments will be full of residents, and none will know that they reside on what was once the finest wildlife habitat in the county. At least the old man was gone before he had to see it.
The hunting was good but the birds on the old man’s farm were scattered and out of their normal routines. I made the most of it, reminisced about past hunts and the old man’s story’s of how things used to be. On the last day I got a text from one of the family members…”get your cameras and stands before you go, the farm will likely be sold before deer season”. In no more than five years the old man’s farm, where his dad had plowed the dirt with mules, will fall victim to the little town that is bursting at its seams.
Cherish your favorite wild places and never take them for granted. Like the song says, “The only thing that stays the same is everything changes”.

*I typed the above words into my phone with my back against a huge oak log on the lower end of the old man’s farm. It was the last hour, of the last day, of the last hunt. When I saved the story in my notes and set my phone down in the leaves, I heard the deep purr and course cluck from a curious gobbler. Through a space beneath the log, behind me and to my left, I watched the feet and spurs of two big Toms parallel the log at ten feet until they rounded the end into the open. Those two gobblers stamped an exclamation mark to the end of that chapter and somehow made it just a little easier to say goodbye to the Old Man and his Farm.

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