Jenna Malzahn moves with purpose as she opens Harriett’s jaws and extracts a tooth that will determine the sleeping bear’s age.

It is only one of the many responsibilities the 27-year-old Auburn University graduate student must do while Harriett snoozes on bags of ice. A GPS-tracking collar must be placed around the bear’s neck. Two tags will be affixed to Harriett’s ears. And hair samples are to be pulled for DNA research.

Time is of the essence. Within two hours, the bear will awaken from its sleep and return to the wild.

“She’s not feeling anything at all,” said Malzahn, who is calm but moving at a hurried pace as she checks Harriett’s temperature by inserting a thermometer into the anus. The bear’s temperature is normal.

Harriett, a young female bear, is estimated to weigh 127 pounds. She appears to be healthy as she roamed the woods of Eight Mile in Mobile County before she was trapped overnight inside an 8-foot-by-4-foot cage that is large enough to temporarily hold a bear that is as big as 300 pounds.

Malzahn and a group of volunteers arrived at sunrise to inspect the bear, and to sedate her with a dose of Telazol – somewhat of an aesthetic/valium combination.

For Malzahn, Harriett’s good health is temporary relief. Overall, the health of black bears like Harriett that call Mobile County home is concerning. An alarming statistic from research conducted over the past four years at Auburn University suggests more than three-quarters of the region’s black bear cub population is dying.

Malzahn’s work is centered on trying to find out why. Plenty of suspicions abound, and the work to save these bears could continue for years to come.

In the past two years, Malzahn has trapped 32 bears as part of Auburn’s overall black bear research. Over the past four years, 22 cubs – baby bears under age 2 – were trapped and collared. Of those, 17 have died.

“We have a high mortality rate, and we want to find out why that is happening,” said Malzahn, a Royal Oak, Michigan, native who is studying the reproductive ecology of black bears as she pursues a master’s degree in wildlife science.

Malzahn is a 2017 University of Michigan graduate. And while her last name might sound familiar, she is not related to the former Auburn football coach.

Bear research

The concerns in Southwest Alabama are a stark difference from Northeast Alabama, where the black bear population is flourishing in Dekalb, Cherokee and Etowah counties.

Once considered a tiny population compared to Mobile County, the number of black bears in Northeast Alabama has gone from 11 in 2012, to more than 75 within the past year.

“That population is growing well and is healthy,” said Todd Steury, a wildlife ecologist and assistant professor at Auburn since 2008, who oversees the bear research project and perfects the trapping and tagging techniques within his lab.

Auburn University has led the state’s study of bears since 2010, when Alabama first began receiving federal funding through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct bear research. The research was organized as a way for the state to get a better understanding about the mammal’s habitats in Alabama.

“When we first started, we knew very little about our black bear population in Alabama,” said Traci Wood, state wildlife grants coordinator with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “We reached out to Auburn and discussed what we needed to know about black bears, where they were in the state, and what is the condition of their population and about how many bears do we have. And we’ve been working through in answering those questions for over the past decade.”

Northeast and Southwest Alabama – primarily in Mobile County – are the only two areas of Alabama in which a reproducing population of black bears have been found.

Male bears can be found anywhere in the state, and the largest known bear was captured in Lee County.

“But through research, we have not identified a sustainable reproducing population except (in the Northeast and Southwest areas of Alabama),” Wood said. “We continuously get the comment, ‘I did not know there are black bears in Alabama.’ But we proudly remind them the black bear is the state mammal and are becoming more abundant in the state.”

The black bear became the official state mammal in 2006. It’s also the official state mammal in West Virginia, New Mexico, and Louisiana.

Northeast Alabama bears

The northern black bear populations, found mostly in DeSoto State Park and Little River Canyon Falls Park, “are doing very well,” Wood said, due to a lot of protected forested habitat. The northern populations are believed to be migrated from the large black bear population in North Georgia.

In fact, the population is growing at such a healthy rate that Steury is considering whether to tweak Auburn’s research. Instead of assessing the bear’s habitat, the Auburn researchers are wanting to mitigate the number of automobile-bear collisions.

“There are now enough bears up north that we’re seeing more and more being hit by cars,” he said. “We’re proposing to do research up there on where bears crossroads and to try and find a way to mitigate that.”

Wood said that vehicle crashes are the “No. 1 cause of death in black bears,” in the northern region.

“Typically bears avoid people and roads, but when you have a male looking for a mate or a young bear that has been kicked out by mom and doesn’t know what life is about, they are not going to have a good head on their shoulders as far as making decisions,” Wood said. “During the summer, when that is going on, that is when you see the most collisions.”

The growth of the bear population in Northeast Alabama has not prompted a public push for bear hunting, which is allowed within a restricted time frame in Georgia.

The state has long outlawed hunting bears, and they are considered “priority species of concern” in all regions of the state. Concerns about a bear’s habitat and overall health define the priority species label, Wood said.

Black bears in Alabama have never been included on a federal list of endangered species. The Louisiana black bear is the only subspecies of the American black bear listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act from 1992 to 2016.

“We have not had any conversations about its potential federal listing,” said Wood. “But the point of the state wildlife grant program is to prevent animals from being federally listed (as “threatened”). Once you get that federal designation, there are a lot of rules and regulations put into place. We hope to work with the animals in this program to prevent that next step.”

The state’s average annual funding for the bear project is $75,000 to $100,000. Funding does not come out of state or local coffers but is primarily allocated through annual federal appropriations.

Bear research is also conducted in other states. The University of Georgia and the University of Florida does its own analysis. Texas agencies are also undergoing bear research.

Mobile County concerns

In Alabama, the greatest concern about black bear health lies directly in Mobile County, where a breeding population of bears has existed for hundreds of years.

Steury said the high cub mortality rate does not necessarily mean the “bear population needs saving.” But he said it does need “help” in trying to “grow better.”

The bears found in Mobile County, Steury said, are much scrawnier than the bears found in the Northeast portions of the state, where he said the bears appear “like a healthy stuffed teddy bear.”

“By mid-April in (Mobile County), they are considerably smaller and scrawnier,” Steury said. “We don’t know if they are growing smaller and that’s the next phase of research we are trying to figure out.”

Said Wood, “I would consider the population somewhat fragile. There is inner breeding going on. It’s very male heavy. There are not as many females in the population contributing to new generations. And the fact that cubs are not making it to adulthood … we have to figure out how to manage that population better. We don’t know the answer yet.”

Steury said he believes a bear’s den “certainly plays a role in some of those things,” and that research by Malzahn and others is focusing on a young cub’s environment.

He isn’t certain if climate change is a factor.

“That’s a tough one,” Steury said. “Certainly, it’s getting hot. Mobile is hot. And let’s say that much of this problem is driven by the nutrition of cubs and parents. Is climate change having an impact on their nutrition? It might be if it’s influencing the food for them. They would not be spending much time foraging if they are out and about. There is that potential. But that is a difficult thing for us to demonstrate definitively.”

Steury said he would like to see the Florida black bear subspecies – often found in abundance near Apalachicola in Northwest Florida – “reconnect” with South Alabama.

“It’s not easy to do,” he said. “We found that in research from last year that bears do not like to cross the Perdido River floodplain. It seems to be the main barrier to movement.”

Steury said another concern in Mobile County is that the bears’ habitat is under constant threat from development. Saraland and west Mobile continue to experience high growth as subdivisions and other construction migrates toward traditional bear habitats.

“People say the bear population is growing because we are seeing more bears,” Steury said. “I don’t think so. We are seeing more humans in bear habitats.”

He said future grants could allow Auburn researchers to utilize cameras, thermal drones and other technology to investigate the dens, and “try to answer questions on whether (cubs) are born later or grow smaller.”

“We want to do that without going to the den so we don’t disturb the mom,” Steury said.

Malzahn, the Auburn student, doesn’t mind temporarily disturbing the bears she catches. The information she gets from each one is proving valuable, she said, toward unlocking more clues as to why Mobile County’s bear population is struggling.

“We have a lot of questions to answer,” she said. “Hopefully, we can figure it out and help the population.”