Pennsylvania Game News - October 2016 - 13

had enough. Korber draped his arms over
the tripod, leaned forward and flipped the
camera's switch to off.
"It would have been easy for him to
say, 'I'm a professional cameraman, and
you are not a professional narrator," Alt
said of Korber.
Instead, Korber assured Alt they'd get
through it, and he'd be behind the camera,
filming, no matter how long it took.
"Basically, he said we're going to do
this together, or we're not going to do it
at all," Alt said.
Soon enough, Alt gained confidence
and the sequences grew smoother.
"We meshed really well," Korber said.
But documenting the story of Pennsylvania's black bears took commitment.
It's not as if Alt and Korber were in the
field every day filming for the video, but
they'd shoot for a week straight sometimes, and work from sun-up to sundown,
after dark or whatever the job required.
"You'd go for days and get little tidbits," Korber said. "And every once in
a while, you'd get something and think,
'Nobody is going to believe this.'"
They checked scenes off their list with
amazing success, Alt said.
"And if we couldn't do it, we'd do it a
different way," he said.
All but two scenes in the film were shot
in the wild in Pennsylvania.
Footage of two males fighting, then the
victor breeding with an estrous sow, were
filmed in captivity at Space Farms Zoo &
Museum in northern New Jersey, with the
camera set on scaffolding high enough to
shoot over the fence.
"We knew we likely wouldn't get that
in the wild in the timeframe we were
working on," Alt said.
Most of the other bears shown were
OCTOBER 2016	

See it Online
On the Trail of Pennsylvania's Black Bears is
available to view at the Game Commission's
YouTube channel, PAGameCommission

habituated to people and didn't view the
camera as an intrusion. They exhibited a
lot of predictable behavior, Alt said. And
when the script called for things like
showing that bears sometimes prey upon
unhatched eggs in wild-turkey nests, he
and Korber would secure sterile eggs from
a game farm and make a nest, and a bear
most surely would visit.
Alt thought it essential, too, to reference the importance of winter-killed deer
as a food source for bears emerging from
their dens in late-winter and spring, when
a lot of other foods are in short supply.
He and Korber had planned to pick up
a roadkill, place it in a natural-looking
setting near a road or drainage, and wait
with camera rolling. In fact, Alt knew just
the place he wanted to put it.
The problem was finding a deer.
In a state where about 40,000 of them
were killed annually by vehicles at the
time, Alt said an agency-wide call for any
road-killed deer in good enough shape
to use in the video went unanswered for
weeks. The window of opportunity was
closing.
Soon, however, Korber and Alt learned
two deer had been killed by vehicles
within Hemlock Farms, the Pike County
subdivision where many scenes in the
film were shot. The deer had been taken
to a nearby dumpster, which Alt said was
positioned at the bottom of a hill so people
using it could pull alongside and heave
their garbage in.
From this vantage, Alt peered into the
dumpster. He couldn't see any deer. So he
13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY8LhHRsMr0
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - October 2016
