Restoring woodlands for Louisiana black bears

In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt went bear hunting in Mississippi. The president had difficulty locating a bear, so one of his guides captured one, tied it to a tree and presented it to Roosevelt to dispatch. Teddy, of course, refused to shoot.

After the incident made national news, an enterprising New York store owner created a stuffed toy — “Teddy’s Bear” — that captured the nation’s imagination.

Few who ever cherished their own Teddy Bear would know or, understandably, care that the original bear was almost certainly a member of a subspecies known as the Louisiana black bear. Fewer still would know that this subspecies, differentiated in part by a relatively long and narrow skull, suffered drastic population declines and was only recently removed from Endangered Species Act (ESA) protection.

However, the history and conservation status of Louisiana black bears are well-known to landowners, conservation practitioners and natural resource managers in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley. Stakeholders there have worked diligently to restore the rich but disappearing forests and wetlands of Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

To them, the bear’s comeback shows that solid stewardship and landscape-scale conservation efforts can pull an iconic wildlife species out of a precipitous decline and, in the process, spare local landowners some of the regulatory burdens that often accompany ESA listings.

In 2022, NFWF awarded $1.1 million to The Carbon Fund to improve habitats for bears and other wildlife by helping landowners reforest marginal, increasingly flooded cropland.

These new forested wetlands will provide habitat for wood ducks, mallards and other waterfowl, along with fish such as smallmouth buffalo and blacktail shiner that require structurally complex habitat to spawn successfully.