In the woods of Greene County, Dan Giles and his intern Rachel are looking for bear hair.
It's part of a multi-year project to track the density of bears across a five state region.
The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency has set up more than 475 snares with barbed wire that captures bear hair as they brush past.
"When they go either through under or over this wire, they'll leave some hair behind for us," said TWRA's Dan Gibbs.
They've found that a doughnut combined with raspberry scent encourages bears to make repeat visits to the traps.
Gibbs' team carefully collects the strands of hair left behind to send to a lab in Canada.
"It may help us identify places where we need to potentially work more on educating the public about living with bears," Gibbs said.
Giles said the general public shouldn't leave food out for bears like this because they might get too used to humans.
"We’re pretty comfortable with this, but we still encourage people not to feed bears. You don’t want to leave trash around your home because you will cause the bear to come back."
But he said his team takes care to make sure bears don't know who their sweet treat came from.
"They're finding this out in the middle of the woods," he said.
The TWRA said it has four weeks left in this season's six week snare program.