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Black bear populations are bouncing back. Here’s how these Texas towns are coping
Ken Clouse and his wife Pam look at a still image taken from a game camera on their porch. The couple says in the last two years, they’ve regularly seen black bears in their neighborhood south of Alpine, Texas.
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ALPINE, Texas — In one of the most remote corners of Texas, Matt Hewitt is unlocking the door to a giant steel trap he’s hoping will catch a black bear.
“It’s completely empty,” Hewitt says, as he reaches for a bucket with bait – days-old glazed donuts and frozen cantaloupe.
Hewitt, a researcher at the Borderlands Research Institute, affiliated with Sul Ross State University, leads a group that captures and collars black bears to try and get an idea of just how many are roaming the mountains and desert stretches of Far West Texas. And although it’s too soon to say exactly how many bears there are, Hewitt believes “there’s more than people realize.”
Historically, black bears were once the biggest predator to travel the region in large numbers, but overhunting and habitat loss led to their decline over several decades.
But in recent years, the number of black bears in West Texas have been on the rise: sightings in the state have jumped from nearly 80 in 2020 to at least 130 so far this year, according to state data. And in other states, researchers believe black bear populations are growing too.
Inside an eight-foot steel trap, researcher Matt Hewitt has sprinkled stale doughnuts and chunks of cantaloupe. Hewitt hopes the bait’s enough to lure and trap a black bear.
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Matt Hewitt, a researcher with Borderlands Research Institute, heads for his truck after securing a snare, which he hopes will snag tufts of bear hair.
Carlos Morales/NPR
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Carlos Morales/NPR
But in West Texas, for all the celebration of the bears’ return to the wilderness, there are challenges and concerns as bears have ventured into neighborhoods, gotten into yards and posed a threat to livestock and pets.
“I don’t mind the bears coming back, we don’t want them wiped out, that’s for sure,” said Pam Clouse, who lives in Alpine, an area that’s seen a number of bear encounters in recent years. “You know, they were almost extinct.”
Clouse and her husband, Ken, both grew up in West Texas, and consider themselves wildlife enthusiasts. During drought years, the couple would sprinkle buckets full of corn on their yard and keep troughs of water on their property for wandering wildlife like deer and javelina.
Recently, they removed the food and water at the suggestion of state officials, and have even electrified their fence, too — all in effort of keeping the bears away.
But the bears are still coming, they say. “These bears are pretty large,” said Pam Clouse, as she pulled up an image of a bear from a trail camera at their house. “They’re probably about 4, 500 pounds if I had to guess.”
A still image taken from a trail camera Pam and Ken Clouse have on their porch in Alpine, Texas.
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The Clouses feel like more can be done to ease residents’ concerns over bears wandering onto their property. “I’m not promoting a hunting season for the black bears,” said Ken Clouse. “But there’s got to be some type of control.”
A mural in downtown Alpine, Texas highlights the wildlife that call the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas home – including the black bear.
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Learning to live with bears
In states like Montana and Colorado, residents have adapted to living with bears by installing bear-resistant dumpsters and trash bins and, in some cases, installing alarm systems or sprinklers — things to try and startle bears.
But of all the measures, wildlife biologists stress removing food and anything that might attract a hungry bear.
During the late summer and fall months, as black bears prepare to den, they’re looking to eat as much as possible, and they’ll go through great lengths to consume the 20,000 daily calories they’re after.
“They have a great sense of smell, much better than our own,” said Raymond Skiles, former wildlife biologist at Big Bend National Park in West Texas. “So, number one, they can smell food when you and I would never have a clue.”
Skiles was at Big Bend National Park when black bears made their return there in the late 1980s. He said it took time and work at the park, but they were able to adapt to the return of bears there. The park brought in dumpsters that were hard for bears to get into, educated visitors about the animal, and put into place rules that ensured food wasn’t being left out.
Today, Skiles said, those measures have gone a long way in reducing the possibility of bear-human conflict in the Chisos Mountains, one of the most popular corners of the park. Now, Skiles wonders if the same can happen in cities and towns across West Texas.
Krysta Demere sits in the offices for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in Alpine. Part of her job as a wildlife biologist is getting people ready to live with black bears and educate them in hopes of reducing bear-human conflict.
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From the national park, an expansive stretch of desert land roughly the size of Rhode Island, the bears are now pushing north. Wildlife conservationists here say it’s likely because the land has reached what they call “carrying capacity.”
“And when you’re over carrying capacity, there’s not [enough] resources on the natural landscape for those animals,” explained Krysta Demere, a wildlife biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “So, then they begin to move out and search for new food sources.”
Part of Demere’s job is to help people across West Texas get ready to live with bears, something they haven’t experienced in well over 80 years.
“And that’s a long time,” said Demere. “That means there’s not a generation alive today that’s had to live with [the] black bear before.”
But the next generation in Alpine and the ones after that will likely grow up knowing this place, once again, as bear country.
The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
Nebraska Medicine
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Nebraska Medicine
Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
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Nebraska Medicine
The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Medicine
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
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Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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