Researchers Tuning In to Black Bears : Virginia: Radio collars help answer such questions as how many bears remain and whether their population is growing, declining or stable.

Bear No. 37 lay limp and drugged on the back of a truck bed in the George Washington National Forest, ready to go back to the wild.

She was captured last summer in Virginia near Shenandoah National Park after making a nuisance of herself raiding cornfields and beehives. Now she was going off with a radio collar and her three cubs to join a major study of Virginia’s black bears. Two other adult female bears were being released at other sites.

The study, a joint project of state wildlife officials and Virginia Tech scientists, will try to answer such basic questions as: How many bears are there? Is the population growing, declining or stable? How do logging and hunting affect their numbers?

Game officials believe Virginia’s bear population is about 3,500 and growing. One piece of evidence, they say, is an increasing volume of complaints in northern Virginia about bears getting into trash cans or otherwise becoming a nuisance, even where human populations aren’t rising. But officials are concerned that poaching may be growing, too, serving a market in Asia where bear gallbladders fetch thousands of dollars.

The study is a 6-to-10-year effort that is being watched closely by hunting groups, timber companies and environmental organizations--all of which chipped in to pay for it. Bears within the Shenandoah National Park’s protection have been studied, but this is the first close look at Virginia’s hunted bears.

If the study finds that bears shy away from logging roads, that could increase pressure to restrict timbering. Likewise, environmentalists hope it will produce evidence that the state’s controversial bear-chasing season--in which dogs pursue and tree the animals--is harming the population. Some hunters and logging companies hope the study will endorse expansion of their activities.

“We want to keep a good handle on the bear population here,” said Michael Vaughan, the Virginia Tech wildlife biologist who is the study’s chief researcher. “It is a hunted population, and we don’t want to over-hunt it.”

The Virginia bear study began last summer, when 50 animals were trapped and fitted with radio collars in Augusta and Rockingham counties, near the West Virginia border about two hours from Washington. Two dozen more were to be collared beginning in June in Craig and Giles counties, west of Roanoke.

When researchers tracked the radio-collared bears to their lairs, they got a surprise. Twenty-five of the 27 they trapped had made their dens in hollow trees, sometimes far off the ground. The others were under piles of rock or brush, where researchers had expected them to be. That told the researchers something about the type of habitat the bears may need.

The black bear is at the top of the food chain in the mountains of Virginia, with the obvious exception of humans. The animals eat acorns, berries, plants, carrion and the occasional live prey, from small rodents to sheep.

Their babies are born blind, weighing a half-pound. They don’t really hibernate but spend winter in a half-sleep, leaving the den if need be. They live about a dozen years in the wild in Virginia.

No animal in the region is bigger. Adult males can top 400 pounds, and if a full-grown bear stood up to dance with you, it would be seven feet tall. But the animal, unlike its grizzly and polar cousins, has a reputation for shyness.

“They do anything, pretty much, to avoid human confrontation,” said Robert Beyer, chief of wildlife for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources.

But as researchers tried to strap a radio collar onto one of the cubs one day recently, the animal was anything but retiring. It squirmed. It squealed like a pig. It lunged, trying to bite. It took three people to attach the collar to Bear No. 37’s seven-pound baby.

“By the next denning season, this cub will weigh 35 to 40 pounds,” Vaughan said.