AmericanBlackBear_SierradelCarmen_Paredes_Marcos_LajitasTX_3April2001_Reel2148.mp3

Marcos Paredes [00:00:01] My real experiences with black bear in this part of the world came from across the river in the Sierra del Carmen.

Marcos Paredes [00:00:07] And I don't know if, if I had told you this, but I outfitted horse trips into the Maderas del Carmen for about 10 years.

Marcos Paredes [00:00:15] The Carmens, the Maderas, have a lot of black bear, a lot of black bear. And one particular trip I counted 11 different bears that we saw on the trip.

Marcos Paredes [00:00:31] And, you know, we have, working at the park there at Big Bend, we have these, these exchange students that come over and work in the park from, from Mexico, from the University of Chihuahua, or Saltillo, from PROFAUNA, probably one of the greatest conservation organizations in North America. And Julio Carrera - see, another hero of mine! He, he has cranked out more conservationists from Mexico. He's like a little factory for conservationists that he's got going at PROFAUNA.

Marcos Paredes [00:01:13] But he sent two students down here, Gallileo Portes and El Oso y El Halcon. The falcon and the bear, you know, because that's what they were both down here doing. And one of them really had these falcon-like features and the other one looked like a little bear, and Marc Antonio Herron was his name - Marc Antonio Herron.

Marcos Paredes [00:01:37] He asked me about going into the Carmens to do a bear survey. And I was really interested in that. I told him I'd seen a lot of them. And we did, just did a very cursory survey of the bear population over there. Basically what we did is we set up track traps. We, we did these transects, you know, bait stations a mile apart. And we would clear out a track area where when they came in to the bait, they would leave tracks and then we'd make plaster casts of their tracks and measure them and see if it was the same bear or a different bear.

Marcos Paredes [00:02:11] And the conclusion we came to was that, and I don't know if this is a scientific term or not, but there were "chingos" of bears in Maderas del Carmen. Chingos of them - saturated - the, that habitat was saturated, you know. And that was just, you know, a very rough estimate that we'd come up with is that there were more God dang bears than you could shake a stick at over there.

Marcos Paredes [00:02:52] And, two years later, we started seeing bears showing up again in the park and on the Texas side.

Marcos Paredes [00:03:02] And I think that's one of the, one of the great stories of the national parks and a testament to the benefits of setting areas aside like this: that after having been extirpated and gone for 40 years, 40-some years, that the black bear made a comeback to Big Bend, you know. They crowded themselves out of the Maderas del Carmen until they started finding their way back into the Chisos.