Black Bear Return

During a 1988 hike through the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park, a visitor named David Lloyd captured an extraordinary sight on film. He took a photograph of a female black bear and three cubs. His photo confirmed the existence of a breeding population in Texas, the first in the years since they had been extirpated in the 1950s. The bear had likely come from the Sierra del Carmen and Serranias del Burro in Mexico, where they had been protected on large and remote cattle ranches that tolerated the bear. The bears’ protection had been augmented by Mexico’s listing of the species as endangered in 1985, and the closure of the hunting season for bear in 1986. Severe drought in the mid to late 1980s reduced acorns, pinyon nuts, and berries in northern Mexico, and pressed bear to seek new habitat, across the Rio Grande and north into the Chisos.