Local blogger shares photos of bear tagging expedition

Asheville resident David McKillen recently followed along with a team of biologists from the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and N.C. State University on an expedition to track and tag black bears. But not just any black bears. These black bears are living within Asheville city limits.

“Black bears seem to be a pretty significant part of the mountains we live in,” McKillen writes in his blog, BaseBuild. He adds that he has encountered 12 different black bears in his Asheville neighborhood in the space of four months.

“Where do black bears of Asheville, North Carolina actually live?” McKillen writes. “As it happened, the area we moved to has a considerably more active bear population. Unbeknownst to us there is an active tagging and tracking study underway in our part of the city.”

Though McKillen has opted not to identify his neighborhood out of privacy concerns, he did share some photos and a video from the tagging expedition. You can read about that in a post on McKillen’s blog from May 8.

McKillen, who studied zoology at University College Dublin before transitioning to a career in information technologies, added a second post last week with some additional photos and information on how the bears are lured into being tagged.

“In order to trap the bears the biologists spray molasses in the trees and around the trap,” he writes. “They also put doughnuts inside and around the trap and spray more molasses there too.”