[07/10/01] Vicksburg has joined the ranks of such Mississippi communities as Rosedale and has a black bear sighting all its own.

Bunny Reihsmann spotted the bruin on U.S. 61 North Monday morning between the Super Jr. convenience store and the Culkin Road overpass.

Black bears are no strangers to Mississippi, but it has been years since they were a common sight in the state’s forests. When vast forests covered the Mississippi Delta, they roamed all over and even attracted President Theodore Roosevelt to Sharkey County for a bear hunt near Onward in 1902. As the bottomland hardwood trees were cut to clear more and more land for the production of cotton and other crops, the bears disappeared.

Last year, bears again made headlines in Mississippi as they were spotted in several locations, including Rosedale. The most excitement came when a female bear swam the Mississippi River with a pair of cubs in tow.

But the bear seen Monday morning in Vicksburg it was seen inside the city limits did not appear to be a female and was most likely a young male looking for a place to live, said Bo Sloane, a member of the Mississippi Black Bear Restoration Task Force, an organization of wildlife professionals that hopes to re-establish the bears in at least some of their original range.

Reihsmann said she was headed north on U.S. 61 North when she saw the bear.

“It was trying to cross the road,” she said, adding she caught a glimpse of the animal out of the corner of her eye and thought it might be a large dog. A second look as the animal avoided an oncoming pickup dispelled that notion.

She said a pickup headed north just ahead of her nearly hit the animal before it doubled back toward woods near the highway.

“It ran back and forth like it was confused,” Reihsmann said.

It then dove off in the woods and disappeared.

She said she managed to get her car stopped and looked around near the edge of the woods to see if she could see a track or other evidence, but the ground was too hard.

The animal stood about 3 feet tall and appeared as if it may have weighed between 150 and 200 pounds. “It was healthy, too,” she said. “Its face didn’t look thin or anything like that.”

Sloane said the size reported by Reihsmann is consistent with a sub-adult male bear and bears of that type are great wanderers.

“We captured one about four years ago three or four miles north of Greenville, and within three months it was killed by a car on Interstate 20 near Tallulah (La.),” he said to illustrate how young male bears wander.

Because of their tendency to roam great distances, Sloane said the bear could well have come from the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge a few miles southwest of Tallulah.

Although there are believed to be only 50 or fewer black bears in Mississippi, Sloane said the task force is hopeful that will soon change.

“We have everything we need, biologically, here in Mississippi,” he said, pointing to the Delta National Forest near Rolling Fork, the woodlands in the Big Black River bottoms and wildlife management areas such as Mahannah Wildlife Management Area north of Vicksburg. He also said the federal Wetlands Reserve Program has encouraged landowners to reforest marginal cropland and convert it to wildlife habitat.

“We have some really good bear habitat,” he said.

The only problem is getting female bears to take up residence in Mississippi. The six females that swam over from Arkansas last year all returned when time came to den up for the winter.