For 18.5 years bear No. 20 lived on Eglin Air Force Base in an area basically north of General Bond Avenue. Unfortunately, she got out on the busy highway on Dec. 9, and was struck by a car and died.
Andrew Jernigan, a wildlife technician with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), arrived at the scene to pick up the 150-pound bear and discovered a small metal tag with the number “20” in one ear. While Jernigan wasn’t familiar with the type of tag, it turns out the old bear with a graying muzzle was part of a bear study on Eglin that began in the mid 1990s.
The study participants involved the Department of Defense, University of Florida (UF), University of Tennessee and the then-Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission.
Read a study of the bear's movements. >
Enter David Alden, who was a UF student in the ’90s studying wildlife ecology. Now, Alden is an FWC wildlife biologist.
Alden said No. 20 was captured, tagged and fitted with a radio-tracking collar on June 20, 1995. When No. 20 was first captured, she was 1.5 years old.
“No. 20 never got into garbage or caused any problems,” Alden said. “The biggest issue with her is when she started having cubs, she would stand at the edge of the woods and everyone would stop and look at her and her cubs.”
However, No. 20 wasn’t the only interesting bear of the study group of 28 bears.
Another bear, a 325-pound male known as X3, was originally captured in the Apalachicola National Forest in 1991 as a nuisance bear, tagged and then released. X3 was again captured on Tyndall Air Force Base on May 26, 1996, as an 11-year-old bear moved to Eglin and fitted with a radio-tracking collar.
X3 spent two days on Eglin and then began a westward trek that ended slightly more than a month later when he was captured by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries in the Baton Rouge business district.
Amazingly, X3 had made it across at least four interstate highways, 16 two-lane divided highways and more than 100 other paved and unpaved roads in his journey. On a straight line, he had traveled more than 315 miles before being trapped inside Baton Rouge.
` X3 was returned to the Apalachicola National Forest on July 2, 1996, hung around a day or two and then began a westward trip. The last reported contact with X3 was on July 13 near Wewahitchka in Gulf County.
Alden said the Eglin study ended in 1999.