Louisiana Bear Season

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Commissioners voted to issue the 10 permits through a lottery. Hunting next year will be limited to the northeastern Louisiana Mississippi Delta parishes East Carroll, Madison, Tensas and West Carroll and portions of Catahoula, Franklin and Richland.

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:rookienumbers:

That's less than the number that get hit by cars each year.
But it's a start.

As a non-resident, I doubt I’ll be able to apply. I will if I can.
I saw a 400 pounder yesterday morning.

Over/under on the number of applications for the first year?

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So they re-introduced black bears to Louisiana so we could hunt them? Anyone think the real reason they did this was to curb the hog problem?

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shite I wish it had worked better if that's the case.

I thought I had read somewhere a few years back that they release a bunch of them in order to repopulate.

LINK

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Studies of reintroduced animals are beneficial to evaluate the success of reintroduction programs and to understand factors influencing fitness of reintroduced individuals. The geographic distribution of the federally threatened Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus) has been reduced to 3 isolated populations due to habitat loss and excessive harvest. We reintroduced 23 adult female Louisiana black bears and their cubs to east-central Louisiana, USA, and documented postrelease space use, survival, movements, and reproduction. Individual females used larger home ranges after reintroduction than they had in the source population (P= 0.037). Spring ranges of reintroduced females were smaller than summer, autumn, and annual ranges (all P < 0.09), which did not differ from each other (all P > 0.60). Survival of reintroduced females did not differ between their first (S = 0.933) and second (S = 1.00) year after release or from annual survival of females in the source population (S = 0.964-1.00). Mean straight-line distance traveled by females from their release sites to the center of established home ranges or last recorded locations was 22.7 km. Six females reproduced after reintroduction and produced 15 cubs. Mean postrelease litter size of parturient reintroduced females (2.5) was similar to reported mean litter size of females in the source population (2.4). Our results suggest that the Louisiana reintroduction program is proceeding favorably; however, future studies should continue to monitor survival and reproduction of reintroduced females in Louisiana. Additional demographic parameters (i.e., cub survival) should be estimated to allow for population viability analysis to determine if the new population is self-sustaining.

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They brought in bears from Minnesota and Canada and released them here. This whole bear thing was to stop the deforestation that was occurring during the soybean boom more than it was about resorting a unique subspecies. The only special bears we have are in St. Mary Parish. The rest are not special. Arkansas also has a true special black bear subspecies that was only recently discovered. If the Louisiana Black Bear was a unique subspecies they never would have contaminated the gene pool with northern bears. That would make zero sense. Of course biologists have done all sorts of stupid things over the years.

Special bears got me laughing! Thanks.

Make a rug. If it had a bad hide, I’d just boil out the skull.

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We reintroduced 23 adult female Louisiana black bears and their cubs to east-central Louisiana

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Pardon my ignorance on this but to me those numbers sound low and to me would lead to a lot of inbreeding. Wouldn't that cause the numbers to dwindle off instead of thrive?

Need me a .416 Rigby fer my upcoming bear hunt.