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‘Skinny’ bear spotted in Texas causing some to worry. ‘Poor guy needs a cheeseburger’

A black bear recently spotted in far West Texas is grabbing attention online, with some worried the animal is going dangerously hungry.

The photos, taken by a visitor at Big Bend National Park and shared to Facebook, show the lean and lanky bear slinking through a campsite in the park that borders Mexico in the Texas desert. It’s a far cry from the image most might conjure up at the word “bear,” picturing a fat, fluffy king of the woodlands.

By comparison, the Big Bend beast seems scrappy.

Lean times?

“Sure is skinny. Must be very hungry!” one person commented.

“Poor guy needs a cheeseburger,” another wrote.

Someone joked the bear might be part Chupacabra, owing its appearance to the legendary Mexican cryptid said to drink the blood of livestock, and generally wreak havoc on the livelihoods of farmers.

But there is a good reason this bear doesn’t look like a stereotypical black bear as most Americans think of them — it’s a different subspecies.

“The Mexican black bear, that this one is, is a leaner, thinner, longer-legged bear than those other bears. So genetically it has a very different sort of build and look,” Jonah Evans, state mammalogist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department told McClatchy News.

That said, this particular Mexican black bear has likely seen better days.

“This bear doesn’t look to be in great shape,” Evans said. “I wouldn’t quite say it’s fully starving yet, but it’s a lean bear and probably having a little bit of a tough time this part of the year.”

Desert bears

While bears are native to Texas, they had been hunted, trapped, and pushed out through habitat destruction in the Big Bend area, to the point there were virtually none left by the time the park was established in 1944, according to the National Park Service.

Bears wandered in from Mexico every now and then, but it wasn’t until the late 1980s that the population truly began to return and reestablish.

“Historically, bears were really common in that country. They tend to be more common in the mountain ranges … the Chisos Mountains are pretty full when it comes to the bear population,” Evans said.

Mexican black bears, like nearly all bears, are opportunistic omnivores and will eat just about anything edible they come across. Occasionally that means meat, like a fawn or a varmint, but it’s mostly bugs, nuts and plant matter.

It might seem like there’s little food to be had in a desert, but that’s not necessarily true, Evans says, particularly for such gifted foragers.

Hit the trail

It’s rare for a bear to starve to death, according to Evans, for a number of reasons.

“When times get really tough, if there’s just no food available, bears move and look for a better place where they’re going to find food,” he said.

“They’ll see another mountain range 40, 50 miles in the distance and they will just bee-line to it across the desert.”

Wandering great distances in search of food can result in salvation, or plenty of times in death.

“When they’re moving like that they’re more vulnerable to getting hit by cars, crossing private property, getting into trouble or maybe getting shot,” Evans said.

Which isn’t to say the skinny bear photographed at Big Bend is in any immediate danger, or that it’s at the brink of starvation, or even that there’s a lack of food where it is.

And there could be another factor at play. The bear is female, Evans said, and it’s very possibly a mother.

“Being a mom is extra tough. You’re trying to find food and you’re trying to nurse babies,” he said. “It’s a tough time for a bear.”

High temperatures have been in the low 100s this week at Big Bend, which is about 320 miles southeast of El Paso.

The lean days shouldn’t last much longer, according to Evans. Just a few weeks can shift the seasons favorably, fix any potential food problems for a time.

“As we get later in the year and trees start producing nuts and stuff, (bears) usually put on a lot of weight in late summer and in the fall,” he said.

No matter how hungry a bear looks, never feed it, Evans added. Interacting with bears makes them more comfortable around people, and that won’t end well for man or animal.

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