Issues → January/February 2008 → Interact → 10 Things to Do →

Classic: Maine's Black Bears

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(page 3 of 5)

Hugie compares replacing a bear in its den as "trying to close an overstuffed suitcase." Sometimes when pushing fails, he lays the bear on a stretcher, tilts it, and slides the bear home. Harry is sprayed with a mild perfume to "remove the stench of humans." Hugie wants Harry to awaken in his den, suffering from nothing worse than a bad dream. If he remembers that his den is no longer sacrosanct he is likely to seek another.

With Harry safely inside, the den is camouflaged with evergreen boughs and smoothed with snow. The equipment is loaded back on the toboggan, and the researchers quietly leave the forest to Harry and his dreams and the steady snow blowing from the trees onto the base of the tall white pine.

When Roy Hugie goes alone to work on bear he carries no weapon. He takes instead his German shepherd, Bucky, who licks the faces of sedated bears. He trusts the bear's lack of aggression, and he trusts a lifetime of experience with wildlife. The son of a forest ranger, Hugie grew up in the backyard of the Cash National Forest in Utah. “I spent so much time hiking and fishing in the mountains it's a wonder I got through school." At 17 years of age he was guiding hunters in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming.

Once while bugling elk he panicked, sensing the tables had turned and the elk were chasing him. Bounding through the woods, he leaped over a fallen log and landed on a sleeping black bear. The bear gave chase, "until she felt she'd made her point," then lost interest.

He has been charged by females whose cubs are whining in his traps. They snarl, pop their teeth, whoosh air through their teeth, "until you swear you've breathed your last," but they always stop 15 feet short.

His friend and Ph.D. adviser at the University of Montana is Charles Jonkle, world-famous bear authority. "He keeps telling me to watch it, that I take too many chances," says Hugie. “ ‘There's a bear out there who's going to crunch you,' Jonkle tells me. I just haven't met him yet. If I were primarily concerned with safety I wouldn't have started this project."

When he was eight Hugie washed a beat-up single-engine plane for a man who in return took him for a ride. There were no doors on the plane and they took off from a dirt field. Whenever he saved $5 thereafter he would race to the airfield, not telling his family. Today one of the few wildlife biologists in the country who is also an experienced bush pilot (which prompted the Smithsonian to offer him a Malaysian tiger study), Hugie is happiest when he can fly and study wildlife at the same time.

From aerial tracking Hugie has learned that there are sharp differences in home ranges for males and females. While a male may require 80 square miles, a female will be satisfied to stay within a four- to ten-mile range. He warns that concentration on small hunting areas may wipe out breeding females. His most remarkable encounter with a bear came from his airplane. He had dropped low over a meadow to observe a bear feeding on the grasses. The bear reared high. As the plane passed over him the bear clawed, asserting his dominance, clawed again, refusing to run.

Two maps hang from a wall in Hugie's cramped office near the campus of the University of Maine at Orono. They represent radio locations of bears in his two distinct outdoor laboratories. Bears will roam far and wide if their home range lies in an area marked by heavy hunting, agricultural activity, and an interstate highway slicing through its center. Of the bears Hugie has tagged here 16 percent will be shot by hunters.