Capture Team Updates: 2024–2025 Field Season Summary
- virginiabearmanges
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Over the past two years, the VBMS capture team has been busy in the field! Our goal is to study bear populations across two distinct study sites:
Northern Site: Augusta, Rockbridge, Alleghany, and Botetourt counties (Mange-Affected)
Southern Site: Smyth and Wythe counties (Non Mange-Affected)
How We Track Bears
Every bear we capture is outfitted with numbered ear tags to help us identify them later. However, depending on the bear’s size and age, we use different types of tracking technology:
Standard Ear Tags: For all bears.
VHF Ear Tags: In the northern site, bears that are too small for GPS collars, receive special ear tags with radio-tracking (VHF) capabilities.
GPS & Camera Collars: These are reserved for specific bears based on our research goals:
Females: We focus on reproductive-age females (3+ years old and over 100 lbs). This allows us to monitor their movements and reproductive success during winter den checks. Stay tuned for those updates!
Males: Since camera collars are heavier, we only deploy them on males weighing over 150 lbs. These cameras give us a "bear’s eye view" of their movement and behavior.
During the handling process, we take numerous measurements and samples that will be used to assist in our analysis of mange in bears as well as bear physiology and overall health. These samples include skin scrapes to check for mange mites, hair samples for DNA analysis, blood samples that can be used for a variety of serological analyses, height, weight, and other morphometric measurements to determine body condition, and photos of each bear. We even grab a quick scat (poop) sample to examine the bear’s microbiome! All bears are safely released on-site once our team has finished the handling process.
Camera Collar
Camera collars provide unique insights into black bear behavior by allowing us to observe their behaviors in their natural settings. To study this, a GoPro-style camera is built into the GPS collar to record a 10-30 second video every 20-60 minutes. From this, we are able to gain great new insight into behavior and foraging ecology. From each bear, we can get up to 18 hours of videos, and they can record over a year’s worth of data. Our longest camera collar duration was with Bear 13, who wore his camera collar for 14 months!
By the Numbers
Across the 2024 and 2025 field seasons, we successfully captured 111 bears:
70 bears in the northern site (where mange has been reported).
41 bears in the southern site (the non-mange area).
36 total collars deployed to study survival, movement, behavior, and reproduction.
Observing Mange in the Wild
In the summer of 2025, we had more success capturing and monitoring bears affected by mange at various stages of the disease. Since the summer ended, our team has been conducting weekly survival checks.
We have seen a wide range of outcomes. For example, female bear #12 showed signs of mange during her capture but appeared to be recovering her coat just three weeks later. Unfortunately, not all stories have a happy ending. We investigated several bear mortalities between August and November, including Bear #39.
What’s Next?
We are preparing for our final capture season this summer in both study areas. We can’t wait to share our final findings with you!
We want to give a huge shout-out to all the private landowners who generously allowed us to trap on their beautiful properties. Your cooperation truly makes this work possible!
In fact, the majority of our mange-affected bear captures in 2025 (7 out of 8 bears) happened on private lands. We look forward to partnering with landowners again this year as we work to better understand how sarcoptic mange is impacting black bears at both the population and individual levels.
Stay tuned for more updates from the field!
All activities are for conservation- and management-focused field studies and do not involve Virginia Tech-owned animals.
