West Virginia Wildlife from Eyewitness News

Bear GPS Collars

You won't believe how far black bears travel in a few short hours! Thanks to new technology, the DNR can keep tabs on the state's largest animials.

March 18, 2009
Reporter: Patrick McMurtry
Videographer: Brad Rice

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That's Gary Sharpe a few years ago, he's one of the top bear biologists in the state and he used to use one of these radio transmitters to keep up with the dozens of bears he tracks every year.

Now Gary and his crew use state of the art GPS collars. Those devices allow him to track the bears without leaving his office. Chris Ryan says those gps collars lets them gather a lot of information.

Chris Ryan/DNR Biologist says:
"Are these bears in places where they can be hunted or are they in places where they can't be hunted? Are their survival rate higher in those places or lower in those places, so that's one of the things we use the GPS collars for. Right now, were downloading the data and we'll be analyzing that this summer, so we're looking at how they move around some of those places and their home range."

This is what the computer program looks like. Each one of those dots is the exact location of the bear and the next one is the where the bear was spotted next. Check out how far this bear went over the mountains in just four hours!

Chris Ryan/DNR Biologist says:
"Thier home ranges seem to be about what we think they should be, 5.5 to 6.5 square miles, but some do make big movements durring certain parts of the year and some of the collars that we put out where they weren't hunted did stay right around those areas."

That's important information for biologists. By pinpointing where these bears hang out, they can firgure out if protected areas are partially responsible for the virtual population boom in the bear population.

Chris Ryan/DNR Biologist says:
"Once we have all the data in and analyzed, we're gonna know if we have sources of bear populations with in the state or if it's one continuous population. Are there places that serve as a source population for the rest of the state, are the bears in thse places basically protected?"

Questions that before biologists could guess the answers to, now they have cold, hard facts to back them up. For West Virginia Wildlife, I'm Patrick McMurtry, Eyewitness News.