Oklahoma Bears: A Comeback from Two Directions
from Red Dirt And Round Bales Hosted by Dave Deken
Black bears once lived across Oklahoma, but by the early 1900s habitat loss, fragmentation and unregulated hunting had reduced them to little more than a memory in much of the state. Their return happened in an unusual way. Oklahoma did not launch a large bear-restoration program of its own. Instead, bears released in neighboring Arkansas expanded westward into eastern Oklahoma. In this episode, Dave Deken traces that comeback into the Ouachita and Ozark regions and then travels nearly 500 miles west to another bear population in Cimarron County. Research using trail cameras, hair samples and genetics found that those Panhandle bears are connected not to Arkansas, but to populations in northern New Mexico and southeastern Colorado. Oklahoma now faces the next stage of the comeback: learning how people and a growing wild bear population can share the landscape. Red Dirt And Round Bales website
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