Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Louisiana was established by Congress in 1980 to protect part of the upper Tensas River basin, a swamp forest and wetland landscape long important to wildlife in the lower Mississippi region. The area is especially significant as the last documented home of the ivory-billed woodpecker, whose decline helped spur early efforts to preserve the Tensas Swamp. Those efforts eventually led to the refuge’s creation. The refuge also preserves one of the last concentrations of the threatened Louisiana black bear and is linked to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1907 bear hunt, an episode that helped inspire the teddy bear.