As it would for the typical U.S. Census taker, the work of counting bears in the woods starts with a clipboard and a blank piece of paper.
Armed with this equipment — along with bear spray and, perhaps more importantly, tick repellent — a team of researchers has been fanning out to hundreds of survey stations set up across western Connecticut this summer to collect data on the area’s resident population of black bears. Their goal is to conduct the first
scientific survey of the state’s bear population in over a decade.
The project is a collaboration between the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the Carnivore and Population Ecology Lab at Mississippi State University, which has conducted similar population surveys of black bears for several other state wildlife agencies.
Instead of trying to locate bears in the wild, the survey relies on hair samples collected in barbed wire traps, which can be used to identify individual bears based on their DNA. Researchers will later come up with a population estimate based on how many different bears they identified and how often those bears showed up in the samples across different geographic areas.
“It’s basically forensics, right,” said Dana Morin, the principal investigator at the Mississippi State lab, who holds a Ph.D. in wildlife conservation. “It’s the same idea as identifying somebody from saliva or something like that.”
The work begins each weekday morning, when members of the 10-person research team head out to collect samples from their daily list of traps. The traps consist of two strands of barbed wire wrapped around multiple trees with a scented lure in the center.
What scents are best for attracting bears? The standard setup, honed through similar projects in other states, uses a small pile of sticks sprayed with used doughnut grease along with a tampon soaked in raspberry extract, which is suspended from a line running through the center of the corral. Both lures are intended to attract bears while not providing them with actual food that can habituate them to humans.
“If a bear is in the area, it might sniff it due to their curiosity, but they’re not going to be coming back because there’s no calories to be gained from it,” said Connor Kurz, the project manager and a research associate at Morin’s lab.
In order to spot hair among the dark hues of the forest floor, researchers use a sheet of white paper pegged to a clipboard to provide a bright background, which they pass slowly underneath the strands of wire. Even to their discerning eyes, it’s not always clear whether the hair is that of a bear or some other furry mammal.
“Bears can come in all different colors,” Kurz says. “Typically, here in the Northeast, they’re going to be black with a brown muzzle, and sometimes they’ll have a white chest blaze. But in other states, they can be brown, cinnamon, red, even white.”
For that reason, any hair collected from the traps is bagged and documented to be sent back to Morin’s lab in Mississippi for genetic testing. The researchers also note any other signs of bear activity in the area, such as footprints, scat or a sighting of a live bear. The population estimate, however, will be based solely on the DNA collected from the hair samples and what that indicates about the number of individual bears living in the area.
The researchers have set up 340 collection sites from the New York border to the Connecticut River. While black bears are known to inhabit nearly every town in Connecticut, they are concentrated more heavily in the western half of the state, and both DEEP and the research team have focused their efforts on studying that population of bears.
The group’s survey efforts are mostly organized into 17 clusters, each containing 12 to 16 individual collection sites spread out in a grid of roughly 14 square miles. (There are also several smaller satellite clusters, with between three and five collection sites, included in the project area).
Kurz said that the field team put careful consideration into selecting each site. They’re looking for a small stand of evenly-spaced mature trees with little brush in the center. Because the sites are generally located at least 100 feet away from any trails, visiting them can require bushwhacking through swampy terrain or dense undergrowth, dodging branches and the occasional cobweb.
Each site is checked weekly for hair samples, starting in early June. As of the first week of August, the team had collected about 850 hair samples from all of its sites. The field work is scheduled to conclude later this month.
In order to get an accurate population estimate back at the lab, Morin uses a technique known as “ spatial capture-recapture, ” which builds upon earlier research methods used to determine the likelihood that any individual bear in an area will show up in one of the samples. By factoring in the size of the survey area along with the distribution of bears within that area into their calculations, Morin said, the team can more accurately determine the density of the bear population.
“That’s accounting for both the individuals we detected but also the individuals we didn’t, and it’s estimating how many individuals are there but we just didn’t happen to detect them,” Morin said. “With the spatial capture-recapture, we’re now also incorporating an estimate of what the area is. We’re getting a more accurate estimate of the abundance by using that.”
Morin said it will take several months to prepare and conduct genetic testing on all of the samples before running the results through her estimation models. A final population estimate based on the samples should be available by next spring, she said.
“The longest part of the process is extracting all the DNA from the hair because it’s pretty tedious, and you have to be really careful with it to make sure nothing gets contaminated and all the samples are straight,” Morin said.
The last scientific study of state’s bear population was conducted by researchers from the University of Connecticut between 2013 and 2014, using similar methods. The results of that study, published in 2016, identified 235 distinct bears using genetic testing and estimated the total bear population in western Connecticut was around 400 to 450 individuals.
Since then, DEEP estimates the total population of bears living in Connecticut has grown to around 1,000 to 1,200 individuals.
As bears have become increasingly common in Connecticut, so have their encounters with humans. Thousands of human-bear confrontations are reported to DEEP each year, with most involving bears eating from trash cans or bird feeders. The agency has also recorded more than 250 instances of bears breaking into homes over the last six years, as well as several reported attacks on humans. Just this week, the agency published an advisory warning that over 50 home entries have already been reported in 2026, more than in all of last year.
In response to those run-ins, some lawmakers have proposed establishing a regulated bear hunting season in parts of Connecticut, particularly the northwest corner. So far, none of those efforts has been successful, and opponents say hunting would do little to address the most problematic bears that tend to live closer to residential neighborhoods.
DEEP has issued some permits allowing farmers to kill bears that damage crops. Experts encourage people living in bear-prone areas to lock doors, keep trash and other food sources stored in bear-proof containers and avoid putting out bird feeders.
Bill Flood, a spokesman for DEEP, said the agency decided to commission a new population survey to help inform its ongoing conservation efforts and its work to mitigate conflicts between people and bears.
“Our previous estimates were completed more than a decade ago, and we know Connecticut’s bear population has changed significantly over that time,” Flood said. “Density and abundance estimates are important metrics for developing effective bear management and conservation strategies. These estimates can be compared to habitat types to help explain variation in density and abundance, population-level behavior, carrying capacity, human-bear conflicts, geographic range expansion and population health.”
Flood said the agency selected Morin’s lab due to its “renowned” work studying bear populations in other states, which include Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina. The cost of the survey, which is between $400,000 and $500,000, is being funded through Connecticut’s share of federal wildlife management grants delivered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Flood said.
While Morin’s lab is based at Mississippi State, the team working on the ground in Connecticut this summer includes researchers and undergraduate students hired from around the county.
For the purposes of developing a population estimate, the team doesn’t closely track how many bears they’ve spotted incidentally while crisscrossing the state. However, they do keep a competitive tally on a white board at one of the houses they rented for the summer.
Ben Woxman, a field technician from Ohio, is currently leading the team with 30 sightings as of early August. He’s also seen a wide sampling of other New England wildlife, including bobcats, grey foxes, porcupine, mink and even a nest of barred owls that is active around one of the survey sites he visits each week.
“I’ve really gotten to see them go from fresh fledglings to now, they’re actually starting to look like adult owls,” Woxman said.
When the researchers encounter a bear in the woods, Kurz said, they generally try to shoo the animal away using loud sounds or, if the bear is being stubborn, they’ll leave and come back at a later time.
So far this summer, he said, no one on the team has had to use their bear spray.
For many of those involved in the project, bears aren’t the only focus of their research interests.
Woxman, for example, is starting a graduate program on waterfowl management in the fall. And Kurz has previously worked on projects studying pythons, crocodiles, frogs, coyotes and river otters, among other species. He said he got involved studying bears after taking a class focused on their mating habits.
Morin said she began her career studying coyote populations in the mountains of Virginia and later transitioned to bears. Her interest in large carnivores, she said, was driven by a seemingly simple question that kept popping up in her conversations with local officials: How many are there?
She compared the work of developing population models to filing out a crossword puzzle.
“We could put collars on animals, we could talk about what habitats they use, and we could talk about survival rates,” she said. But people and state agencies really just need good information about the size of animal populations in order to make the right wildlife management decisions, she said.
“I think the draw for me was that was the question people wanted answered,” Morin said. “And I just I enjoy it."
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This story was originally published by The Connecticut Mirror and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
