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Real Florida

Starting from scratch

The work of wildlife tracker Susan Morse, whose life has been spent deciphering claw marks and identifying paw prints, may help the state's black bears.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published December 30, 2005

[Times photos: Skip O'Rourke]

Wildlife tracker Susan Morse lines up the teeth of a bear skull named Yorick with bite marks on a pine tree to confirm that a bear had made them. Working in the Etoniah Creek State Forest near Palatka in northeast Florida, Morse was attending a gathering of the Florida Endangered Species Network.

	Morse is always on the lookout for trees, like this one in the Etoniah Creek State Forest, marked by bears. Bears communicate by biting and clawing trees and marking them with their scent.
	Susan Morse follows bear tracks on a dirt road near Palatka. Morse, who was inspired in part by the book Born Free, about living near lions, travels the country identifying wildlife, tracking animals or teaching others how to do it.
	Morse measures the track of a white-tailed deer in the Etoniah State Forest. The wildlife consultant is also an avid hunter. “The problem is we — the human race — have destroyed the predators,” she says. “We owe it to deer to be better predators.”

PALATKA - Susan Morse is a good driver when she watches the road. Otherwise she can be dangerous behind the wheel, a bobblehead with blond hair, looking this way, that way, everywhere but straight ahead.

Everybody is safer when she is riding shotgun. From the passenger seat, she can say: "Whoa! Did you see that? I mean that telephone pole? Did you see the scratch marks? A bear really went to town on that telephone pole."

The van transporting her is bouncing down a sand road in Etoniah Creek State Forest, in North Florida, at 20 mph. The telephone pole, dozens of feet away, is a complete blur.

Morse, 57, is a professional wildlife tracker. She lives in Vermont, but she travels all over the country on behalf of universities, road departments and wildlife organizations. They hire her when they need help identifying animals that might be in the neighborhood of a proposed project, though often they hire her to give their workers tracking lessons.

In Florida, black bears have been a hot topic lately. When the Spaniards made landfall five centuries ago, an estimated 12,000 bears roamed the peninsula. Now there are about 1,500 bears and 16-million residents. The state lists bears as a "threatened" species, meaning their future is in some peril.

A black bear family can't survive in a 100-foot city lot as we do. Black bears are large animals that need large wilderness territories to exist; a male bear typically requires about 10,000 acres of woods and swamps for comfort. Every hour in Florida, about 20 acres of bear habitat are lost to bulldozers and concrete, an ominous development for Ursus americanus floridanus - the Florida black bear.

If things keep going the way they are, even Susan Morse won't be able to find any bears.

"Let's do some tracking."

Hiking along a sandy road, Morse is a sturdy strawberry blond who spends much of her time looking down and talking to herself. "Coyote tracks. Raccoon. What's that? Hmmm. Hmmm. Hmmm. A fox."

She has light blue eyes that seem to miss nothing and a pug nose that seems to be sniffing the air for clues. She wears a shirt with the logo of her company, Keeping Track, on the sleeves and heavy boots that are no stranger to water, mud and the occasional heap of bear dung, or, as she calls it, "scat."

Her 25-pound, camouflage-colored backpack is loaded for bear. It contains a camera, notebook, binoculars, a measuring stick and plastic bags for collecting scat. And of course, her pack carries a treasured keepsake known as Yorick.

"Yorick is my bear skull," she says.

Alas, poor Yorick. But at least he is toted around for educational purposes. When Morse discovers a willowy pine that has been gnawed on without mercy, she uses Yorick to show fellow hikers how a bear's jaws did it.

Though she enjoys manipulating mandibles, her time in Florida is spent on mostly serious work. Lately she has been helping an environmental organization, the Florida Defenders of Wildlife, document the presence of bears in a 60-mile stretch between Ocala and Osceola national forests.

The Ocala National Forest has the state's largest population of bruins, about 900 bears. Osceola, west of Jacksonville, boasts another 250. The bears like to travel between the two national forests to find food or mates or establish territories. Right now they have just enough wilderness to make the trip without alarming too many strip-mall shoppers. Civilization is bearing down on them: Not long ago, a middle school was constructed in prime bear habitat in the Etoniah forest. Now school buses thunder past the pines and utility poles bears use to mark shrinking territories.

Defenders of Wildlife has been working with government agencies to buy about 150,000 acres that will help connect the two bear population centers. In other parts of the state, bears seem to be losing the battle to modernity. In Southwest Florida, as the city of Naples marches east into wilderness, bears are encountering people. The bears lose.

Three decades ago, state wildlife officers fielded one or two complaints a year regarding bears. Now they receive hundreds. So far, no humans have been hurt. Recidivist bears that won't stop eating from garbage cans or bird feeders are hauled to Ocala National Forest. Some of those bears end up traipsing through what experts hope one day will be a wildlife corridor to the Osceola.

Susan Morse - think of Calamity Jane without the foul language and whiskey - can growl like a bear. She can bark like a fox and gobble like a turkey. Sometimes a critter answers; sometimes out of curiosity, a critter tracks her. She has never been injured, except once, by a weasel. "My own fault," she says. "It was injured, and I was rehabilitating it, and it bit me."

She pauses beneath an oak and fingers a low branch. "A deer - a buck - rubbed up against this branch. See the rough spot? Bucks have glands on their heads and between their hooves. Looky here." She points below the branch to the sand, where deer hooves have scraped up a storm. The buck was marking territory. A hunter with a gun would be advised to build a blind close by.

"I'm a deer hunter," she says. Back home, in Vermont, she stalks deer every autumn. Unlike hunters who focus on the most spectacular bucks with the biggest antlers, she is more likely to take a younger buck or doe.

"We need the larger, older bucks to pass on their genes," she says. "But we do need to manage the deer population through hunting. Too many deer wreak havoc on ecosystems. The problem is we - the human race - have destroyed the predators. We owe it to deer to be better predators."

She is a predator with a gun. Her freezer is filled with venison. She brags about her juniper berry and wine sauces. Her boyfriend enjoys her cooking and doesn't mind cleaning up.

Morse eats venison and fish and the chickens and sheep she raises. For the record, bear hunting isn't allowed in Florida. Even if it were, she doesn't eat bears.

As a child, Morse wrote a letter to her hero, Joy Adamson, who had published a book about her life studying lions, Born Free. Adamson wrote back, advising Morse to marry well. By wedding a wildlife biologist, Adamson suggested, Morse might be lucky enough to accompany hubby into the field. In 1960, women were often discouraged from pursuing careers in science - even by other accomplished women.

At Penn State, Morse studied literature. Yorick, that grinning bear skull in her backpack, is named after a character in Hamlet. Morse, who prefers Shakespeare to Adamson, grew up in rural Pennsylvania, where three previous generations of her family grew pines. Her happiest moments were spent in the company of wild animals. These days she raises pines in Vermont, but takes as much pleasure in rearing crops of wildlife trackers. For a decade they have been visiting her for lessons or paying her to come to them. She has conducted seminars from the swamps of southern Florida to the north woods of Canada.

In North Florida, she hunkers in the sand.

"Look at these coyotes' tracks," she says. Coyotes walk in a straight line. She can tell because they place their rear paws directly into the tracks made by their front paws. "Very efficient and focused," she says. "No waste of energy. Dogs, on the other hand, have no discipline. When they're walking, they're sniffing here, sniffing there, all over the place. They suffer from sensory overload."

Coyotes, once a western animal, are now found in every state.

"Wild animals don't read books. They don't know where they are supposed be and where they aren't supposed to be. One day coyotes will end up in Paris... Hey look at that! Check this out!"

Something large and feisty has treated a pine sapling like a toothpick. The chew marks are about 5 feet tall. When black bears mark a tree, they stand on their hind feet. They typically rub their backs against the bark, then swivel around and bite it. Often they will reach as high as possible and use the tree as a scratching post.

"A tree is like a newspaper to a bear," Morse explains. "These marks on the tree are communications. Most of the time, bears practice mutual avoidance. Their marks are saying, "I'm here. I don't want to fight. I won't bother you if you won't bother me.' At other times, mating season, a tree becomes a dating billboard. "Hey, Baby! I'm in town. Remember me! Let's go out and have a good time."'

Strands of bear fur, glued to the tree by pine sap, flap in the breeze like a negligee on a newlywed's clothesline.

An adult Florida bear can weigh anywhere from 150 pounds to more than 600. In Naples, a compact car once hit a 625-pound bear on a rural road. Both the car and bear were totaled. But that was more than a decade ago. Now there are strip shopping centers along the same road. Nearby residents not only complain about mosquitoes, but bears that topple garbage cans.

Bears like their vegetables. Sometimes a bear will destroy a cabbage palm to harvest the succulent bud at the heart of the tree. They relish palmetto berries, and when they are especially hungry they will eat the fronds. They will suffer hundreds of stings to steal honey. If they can catch an armadillo, they will devour it. Probably their favorite food is the acorn from an oak.

In the fall, when bears put on weight, they eat acorns by the ton. They will wander miles, swimming rivers and crossing major highways, during the hunt. About 100 hungry bears are killed every fall by vehicles. In winter, female bears seek out dens, usually thick clumps of palmettoes, to give birth to cubs that weigh about as much as a can of Coke. A cub will stay with its mother for a year or so.

A helicopter flies over, heading in the direction of Camp Blanding Military Reservation to the north. Somewhere nearby a heavy truck rumbles along State Road 100. Perhaps the driver is on the alert for bears, but probably not.

Walking intently down the sand road, head down, Morse is tracking bears.

The bear tracks aren't obvious until she points them out. But then they jump out. The big track is about 10 inches long. It almost looks human. "But what would be the bear's big toe is on the outside of the paw and not the inside. Now look. We had two bears here, one larger than the other. I'm guessing a sow and a cub, because male bears usually are solitary this time of year. These are very nice tracks."

She kneels, opens the pack, moves aside Yorick and grabs her camera.

Does a bear excrete in the woods? Yes, it does. Often prolifically. But these bears have left no deposits where Morse can find them.

A raccoon has been less discreet. The wildlife tracker kneels and examines the ample pile of scat with what can only be described as enthusiasm.

"You want to be careful when you mess around with raccoon scat," she says. "Raccoon scat sometimes contains a parasite that can be dangerous to humans. We call it raccoon roundworm. Baylisascaris procyonis. If you don't know what you're doing, avoid raccoon scat."

She stands up, looks around.

"I tell people to practice safe scat."

- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

- Bears in Florida: www.defenders.org/habitat/savewildflorida/

- Susan Morse Web site: www.keepingtrack.org/

[Last modified December 29, 2005, 08:40:09]