The Americas Explained: The Amphibious Black Bears of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Swamp

Each episode of NBC's The Americas focuses on a specific region of the American supercontinent. For an hour, narrator Tom Hanks takes us up close and personal with natural stories happening in faraway places and in our own backyards.

Tonight, we journeyed together to “The Gulf Coast,” where the southeastern corner of North America meets the Atlantic Ocean. It spans approximately 1,200 miles, stretching from Florida to Texas, and is home to the largest swamp in America, the Atchafalaya River Basin.

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The black bears of Atchafalaya, as seen in NBC's The Americas

Bald Cypress in the Atchafalaya Basin, Louisiana. Photo: Dukas/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Atchafalaya covers more than a million acres of southern Louisiana in a vast stretch of marshland, punctuated by tall trees. Those trees are home to a wide variety of species from birds to small mammals and, if you know where to look, you might find a family of black bears sleeping the winter away.

The filmmakers behind The Americas worked with scientists who had been tracking a female bear and knew where she was hibernating. Inside a split oak tree, several feet above the forest floor, she was cuddled up with her two newborn cubs. The Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus), is one of 16 subspecies of the American black bear, typically found along the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya River Basin.

Winter having turned to spring, the bears are stirring, but seasonal floods have covered the landscape with 5 feet of water. She hasn’t eaten all winter and she’s hungry, but finding food will mean braving the waters. She’s large enough and skilled enough to pull that off, but the cubs know nothing of water or predators and are unlikely to survive outside the den. Unfortunately, babies of all species are famously bad listeners.

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Leaving the cubs in their tree trunk den, she slinks into the murky water. She may need to swim more than a mile to find dry land, and in the meantime her curious cubs are left unattended. Just outside their proverbial doorstep is a world filled with large predators and enough water for a baby bear to drown in.

When one of the cubs ventures out of the den and into the drink, it nearly costs his life. But mama bear returns just in the nick of time and her cub survives, having learned a valuable lesson. Her cubs will continue to learn from her for the next two years or so, before setting out on their own. Roughly two years later, they’ll be mature. Given the opportunity, a Louisiana black bear can spend up to 30 years roaming the wetlands of the Gulf Coast.

The Louisiana black bear was previously categorized as threatened, after its population numbers dropped to approximately 150. Conservation efforts have succeeded in rebuilding population numbers and today there are an estimated 1,200 black bears roaming (and swimming) the wetlands of Louisiana.