Sep 15, 2013 By Ben Moyer for The 5 min read

Everyone has heard the term “game warden.” It’s an old name, dating back a hundred years to the days when the job was only about enforcing laws meant to protect wildlife from poaching and outright greed.

Today, a typical day — if there is such a thing — in the life of a wildlife conservation officer is more varied. Although these professionals still enforce wildlife laws, modern demands of the job are diverse. Among those roles are assisting citizens with wildlife conflicts and collecting data for wildlife research.

Recently, the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s wildlife conservation officer responsible for southern Fayette County, Brandon Bonin, got a call from a farmer in Henry Clay Township. The farmer told Bonin there was a bear in the trap Bonin had set in the farmer’s sweet corn patch. The bear had been gorging itself with sweet corn for weeks. Bonin placed the trap in hopes of moving the offending bear to a new location, far from the tempting sweet kernels.

“This bear knew what he liked,” Bonin said. “He had a choice between acres of field corn meant for cattle feed and a smaller patch of sweet corn. He went for the sweet corn.”

Even though it was a Sunday, a bear in a trap needs to be dealt with. Bonin drove to the farm, hooked the trap to the trailer hitch on his truck and headed for the heart of 16,000-acre State Game Lands 51 in the mountains east of Dunbar. He wanted to release the bear there within a couple of hours.

But before Bonin could send the bear on its way in a new habitat, he had to gather data that has helped to make Pennsylvania’s black bear management program so successful, and mark the bear so it could be identified later.

Nobody, not even a professional, can glean much information from an alert and unhappy bear. Before he could “process” the bear, Bonin had to sedate the animal by administering a tranquilizer dart fired from a pneumatic pistol. Officers try to gauge the amount of sedative to the size of the bear. The objective is to gain a safe working window of about 45 minutes, without over-dosing the bear.

When the bear stopped moving Bonin opened the door and, with a little help, dragged the bear outside.

“I don’t like the way he’s holding his head up,” Bonin said as the bear’s jaws worked feebly with involuntary biting motions.

“I’m going to give him a bit more. I’ve never been bitten and I don’t want to be,” he added.

The officer then proceeded through a series of procedures meant to enhance the understanding of bear biology.

Of course, he determined the bear’s sex — male. And because he had no scales at that remote location, Bonin fitted a graduated tape around the bear’s chest that provides a close estimate of the animal’s live weight, in this case 211 pounds.

Next, Bonin extracted one small premolar tooth — about the size of a sweet corn kernel — from the bear’s lower jaw. Officers send the extracted teeth to biologists who cut cross-sections of the teeth and determine the bear’s age by counting annual growth rings, in the same way that foresters age trees.

Game Commission officers process about 600 bears around the state each year. The data they collect reveal the age structure and general health of the state’s bear population.

Finally, Bonin used a clamp-like tool, swabbed with black ink, to tattoo a unique identification number inside the bear’s upper lip.

“If this bear is shot in hunting season, gets hit by a car or shows up in some farmer’s sweet corn again and we have to trap him, we’ll know how far he traveled, how old he is and how much he’s grown in the intervening time,” Bonin said.

Normally, Bonin also attaches a tag with that same number to both ears, but in his rush to head for Markleysburg that Sunday he forgot his ear tags.

“There’s a rumor going around that I’d like to set straight,” Bonin said. “Some people say we put one tag on an ear each time we trap a particular bear, and when that bear gets a tag on both ears, we destroy it the next time it gets into trouble. That’s not true; we always place a tag on both ears at the time of capture in case one tag gets torn out in a fight. Some people use this myth as a rationalization to shoot tagged bears illegally, because they claim we’re going to do it anyway. Not true.”

Bonin then settled down to wait for the sedative to lose its effect, and he grew more reflective during the break.

“This bear looks really healthy; well fed and no mange (a skin affliction caused by mites),” Bonin said. “It’s hard to tell if he’ll head back to where I caught him — some do and some we never hear of again. But, this is good habitat back here, lots of cover and natural foods. He might find a hidden spot in these rocks where he can make it through the hunting season.”

A few minutes later the bear’s eyelids flickered, his ears stood erect and he rose, wavering, to his feet. He looked around, stumbled a bit, and then headed off into the woods as if nothing had happened.

Bonin watched him until he disappeared in the shadows. “This is my favorite part of my job, working with bears,” he said.