The pioneering days of bear research in the 1950s were bonkers and not standardized. One capture team using ether-soaked cotton to put bears into a stupor and included a college football player who once wrestled a bear.
“It was really dangerous. What the young gals and fellas are doing now, it’s so far ahead of what we were doing. We were the pioneers. We were some of the first ones,” seasoned conservationist Cliff Bampton told Cowboy State Daily during a telephone interview from his home in North Carolina.
In the summer of 1958, Bampton, then an undergraduate college student, along with his teammates Ray Long and Steve Browne, captured 118 bears in the Adirondack Mountains in New York State.
At one point, the team was given a sedative dart gun, and “that worked OK,” Bampton said.
However, they stuck mostly with their up-close-and personal approach to subduing bears.
“We continued doing it the old way. We were crazy, young and full of piss and vinegar,” said Bampton, who is now 89.
Bears Sacrifice Testicles
The daring young trio was sent into the mountains to collect data for Hugh Black, who needed information on bears for his doctorate-level studies, Bampton said.
They recorded each bear’s weight, length and other vital measurements.
“I think the largest one we caught was 420 pounds,” Bampton said.
Hapless males each also lost a testicle for the sake of fledging bear research science.
“On male bears, we removed the right testicle and left the left one,” Bampton said.
“With the testicles they (researchers) were hoping to know at what age a bear started producing sperm and at what age they stopped,” he added.
Ether Does The Trick
In some instances, they used “metal culvert-style trap” to capture bears, Bampton said.
“At the far end, there were holes. We would spray ether into the holes. If we see the bear went down, we would open the other end and drag the bear out,” he said.
“Sometimes, they weren’t down completely,” he added, wryly.
Long was charged with injecting the bears with a sedative, Sodium Pentobarbital, to further subdue them.
The team also kept a bucket of ether-soaked cotton handy, just in case.
“We would keep that ether bucket near the bear’s head. If it started coming around, we would stick the bucket over its head,” Bampton said.
Mr. Browne Wrestles A Bear
In other instances, the team used leg traps attached to long chains with a hook on the end.
Once a front paw was caught in the trap, the bear would start to flee, and the hook chain would eventually get caught on a tree, brush or something else solid.
That’s when it was Browne’s turn to step in.
“Steve, since he was a football player at Syracuse, he had all the muscles,” Bampton said.
Browne wielded a “6-foot, galvanized steel pipe,” he said.
At one end, the pipe had a chain loop, designed to go over the bear’s head and around its neck, “like the snare poles that dog catchers use,” he said.
Once Browne had the bear caught, Long would move in and inject it with the sedative.
Then it was Bampton’s job to tie the bear's paws to trees so it was basically “spread eagle” and ready for measurements.
On one occasion, things didn’t go so well.
The bear “bent the galvanized steel pole around to where he was basically face-to-face with Steve,” Bampton said.
A wrestling match ensued.
“The bear would have Steve down for about 20 minutes, then Steve would have the bear down for about 20 minutes,” until Browne finally prevailed, he said.
On another occasion, team had to give up.
“We had one bear that was so big, we messed with him all day long and we couldn’t do anything with him. We had a .357 magnum pistol, and we had to shoot that trap off him” and let the bear run free, Bampton said.
‘Had I Grabbed Hold Of That Sucker…’
In another instance, Bampton almost paid dearly for an act of youthful foolhardiness.
They caught a female bear in the culvert trap, only to discover that she had two cubs with her.
“Both of the cubs ran up these large spruce trees,” he said.
Bampton decided to climb up a tree after one of the cubs, determined to catch it by hand.
“About the time I went to reach for it, it saw there was a tree next to us, and it jumped into that next tree,” he said.
They later caught the cubs, the usual way, and discovered that they weighed about 25 pounds apiece, and had well-developed claws.
“Had I managed to grab hold of that sucker, I would have come right out of that tree and nothing would have saved me,” Bampton said.
‘I’ve Had One Hell Of A Life’
Bampton went on to a lifelong career in conservation, working for The Wildlife Society, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and Ducks Unlimited.
He still enjoys the outdoors, although age is catching up to him, as his eyesight is failing.
“I’m losing my lights. It’s getting harder to see, but I still go full force every day,” he said.
And he’s grateful for a lifetime of shimmering memories, including those of that crazy summer catching bears by highly questionable means.
“I’ve had a hell of a life. The Lord can take me whenever He wants,” Bampton said.
Contact Mark Heinz at mark@cowboystatedaily.com
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
