Cassandra, how did you get turned onto this story?

I came across a lot of social media chatter in West Tennessee, um, reporting different black bear sightings in places where people didn't typically expect to see black bears.

In Tennessee, they're really common in the eastern, more mountainous portion of the state.

Um, but people were, you know, posting pictures of black bears munching on some corn in a corn field, um, you know, running through a golf course, uh, caught on Ring cameras in people's backyards.

So I started looking into why the bears were being seen, you know, in the western portion of the state, um, and found that that's actually their historic habitat.

Um, they were abundant throughout the state of Tennessee and many other states in the Southeast, um, before overhunting and habitat destruction, uh, reduced their numbers drastically.

Uh-huh.

There was a, a study a few years ago that showed that there's still some, you know, DNA evidence that maybe some bears in Louisiana might have some of the DNA of some of the bears that were brought in, like, literally trucked in from those other places.