There are 4,000 black bears in Florida. Is that too few, or too many?

National Geographic

17 hours ago

This 195-pound male Florida black bear, named M13, was identified by biologist Joseph Guthrie on the Lake Wales Ridge in Highlands County, Florida. Photograph by Carlton Ward Jr.
Once on the brink, Florida black bears have made a remarkable comeback. Now, there's a vote on hunting them. Photographs by Carlton Ward Jr.
In a state with such iconic megafauna as the Florida panther and the American alligator, the shy, reclusive Florida black bear is often overlooked. Until there's trouble.
In less than two weeks, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) will hold a vote to decide whether to go ahead with a black bear hunt in December. It would be the state's first black bear hunt since 2015. Proponents of the hunt say the black bear population is sturdy enough to sustain a hunt; opponents say it's not.
Wildlife biologists estimate that roughly 11,000 black bears once roamed across the peninsula, traveling throughout the state's pine flatwoods, swamps and oak scrub. The bears followed the annual fruiting cycle of acorns and palmetto berries, and they travelled widely to find mates.
This was pre-Columbus, pre-conquistadores, pre-missionaries and military forts. It was before the first pioneers shaped the state, before the original land barons built their winter havens along the coasts, before planned development and subdivisions and strip malls, the modern hallmarks of contemporary Florida. This was a time when Florida was still wild, its land a single vast connected parcel for animals to roam. Florida Bear Tracks Join Shelby, a black bear biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildelife Conservation Commission (FWC), and her all-female team in South Florida as they embark on a critical mission: capturing and tagging black bears.
From its pre-Columbian peak, the Florida black bear population fell precipitously. Between unregulated hunting and habitat loss, bear populations dwindled. By the 1970s, the Florida black bear had bottomed out with fewer than 500 bears left in the wild.
But on the heels of a worldwide focus on conservation and wildlife preservation—the first Earth Day was held in 1970; the Endangered Species Act was signed in 1973—the state of Florida turned to safeguarding its native bears. In 1974, the FWC classified the Florida black bear as a threatened species. In the decades that followed, with dedicated conservation efforts, the Florida black bear population rebounded. Today, FWC biologists estimate the black bear population in the state of Florida to be around 4,000 bears—a robust figure. By most accounts, the Florida black bear is an ecological success story.
Yet the numbers are slightly misleading. Though Florida black bears have come back from the low of the 1970s, their population is spread across the state in seven geographic areas, called Bear Management Units by the FWC. While three of those units have more than one thousand bears (1,198 in the central region, 1,044 in the south and 1,060 in the east panhandle), the numbers in the other four units are significantly lower: 496 bears in the north (counted as part of a contiguous subpopulation with south Georgia, adjacent to the Okefenokee Swamp; the total subpopulation has around 1,200 bears), 120 in the west panhandle, 98 in south central and just 30 bears in the Big Bend area.
Opponents to the proposed bear hunt worry that it could decimate populations in some of the units with lower numbers of bears. The FWC says it has restricted the potential hunt to the four Bear Management Units which 'could be hunted in a sustainable manner without decreasing the bear population,' according to information released by the commission. The hunt is intended to target male bears—most female bears should be in their dens by December—and the commission says the 187 permits available for the proposed 2025 hunt is equal to the number of female bears that could be removed without reducing the population of the individual Bear Management Units. During the 10 years since Florida's last bear hunt in 2015, the state's black bear population has grown modestly. Meanwhile, Florida's human population has been booming, with 3 million more people living in the state since the last hunt. The growth puts tremendous pressure on bears and increases the probability of conflict with suburbanites and drivers. The photo above shows a development east of Naples, where new construction is consuming and fragmenting bear habitats. A Florida black bear crosses safely beneath Interstate 75 from Picayune Strand State Forest to Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. There are more than 30 wildlife underpass structures crossing under the long stretch of I-75 called Alligator Alley between Naples and Fort Lauderdale. These underpasses, combined with fencing parallel to the highway that directs wildlife to the crossings, prevent animals from being stuck by cars.
Part of what scientists know today about the Florida black bear's home range comes from a 2009 collaring of a young male bear, known in the literature as M34. The bear was collared by a team from the University of Kentucky, including wildlife biologist Joe Guthrie, then a graduate student. It was a particularly fortuitous collaring.
Female Florida black bears have a home range of roughly 15 square miles. They stick close to their food source of fruit, nuts, berries, termites and ants (with an occasional possum or armadillo in the mix). This helps them stay healthy as they prepare to den down in the autumn and well-fed when they are nursing in the spring. Florida black bears give birth to two or three cubs (in rare cases, four) every other year. The cubs spend the first 18 months of their lives near their mother before spreading out. Female offspring tend to stay close to her as they grow, often inheriting part of her home range. A Florida black bear crosses under a barbed-wire fence from Big Cypress National Preserve onto an adjacent cattle ranch, which bears and other wildlife consider to be one connected habitat. Big Cypress National Preserve is an integral part of 4 million acres of contiguous public land in and around Everglades National Park (an area twice the size of Yellowstone National Park). Whether this large block of public land, and the bears of the Big Cypress population, stay connected to the rest of Florida and the U.S. to the north, depends on whether there is enough new land protection in the Florida Wildlife Corridor. A suburban development east of La Belle, right in the Florida Wildlife Corridor. This development was abandoned decades ago, allowing forest to return between the roadways.
Male Florida black bears, on the other hand, have a much wider home range—anywhere from 25 to 100 square miles, with the average around 60 square miles, enough to breed with several female black bears. Male cubs leave their mother's home range as they enter the three- to four-year mark and approach sexual maturity. They seek new terrain far away from their home range where there's too much overlap of genetic material with the available females. These young males set off on a perilous journey over an unknown landscape, facing dangers from roadways, suburban neighborhoods and older, stronger male bears.
Luckily for Guthrie and his team, they collared two-and-a-half-year-old M34 at the beginning of his journey. The collar stayed on the young male bear for nine months, from October to July, sending highly accurate GPS locations every hour as the bear journeyed more than 500 miles across the state. Over the course of those months, scientists were able to collect substantive evidence showing how large mammals move through the complicated, high-risk landscape of south-central Florida, where conservationists had spent decades fighting for a connected, protected network of land.
(The quest to protect Florida's wildlife corridor)
'Along comes this bear making this outrageous, surprising dispersal and showing how connected it all was,' says Guthrie, now the predator-prey program director at the Archbold Biological Station, an independently operated field research station near Lake Okeechobee. 'Here was a black bear that answered a lot of questions and filled in a lot of our theories. The M34 data revealed the connectedness of the landscape in a way that made sense. It was a great, great discovery for our research and ultimately for conservation.'
Guthrie and his team, along with other advocates for Florida's wild places, used the M34 data to join forces. Their mission: to build a living landscape corridor across Florida, uniting individual conservation lands into an uninterrupted stretch of wilderness. For the Florida black bear, it would mean connecting the pockets of bear populations across the state, ultimately preventing isolation, inbreeding and decline. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologists Mike Orlando, left, and Alyssa Simmons, right, weigh a dead Florida black bear at Rock Springs Run Wildlife Management Area in Lake County on the first day of the 2015 Florida bear hunt. Can hunting and conservation co-exist?
What began as a grassroots idea to protect a pathway of undeveloped lands in a single, connected corridor across the state became a fully fledged, state-supported project in 2021 with the passing of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act. Today, the Florida Wildlife Corridor comprises nearly 18 million acres of contiguous wilderness—10 million of those areas are protected while nearly eight million are connected but not yet protected. The corridor is used by all seven subpopulations of the Florida black bear, and each of the FWC's Bear Management Units is in or touching the corridor. It's also key habitat for other imperiled Florida wildlife like panthers, gopher tortoises, burrowing owls and swallow-tail kites.
'If we want to maintain Florida's natural ecosystems, including its wildlife, we can't do that with postage-stamp-sized pieces of land. It cannot—it will not—work. We need connectivity, a wildlife corridor across the state where animals can move through the landscape. Otherwise, we're going to lose all of the things that are representative of Florida,' says Greg Knecht, executive director of The Nature Conservancy in Florida.
The Wildlife Corridor is also a favorite place for Florida sportsmen like Travis Thompson. Thompson is a life-long hunter and executive director of the conservation-minded nonprofit All Florida, which seeks to bring hunters and conservationists into the same room when making environmental policy. Thompson, like many sportsmen in Florida, believes strongly that both groups share the same environmental goals.
(Hard numbers reveal the scale of America's trophy-hunting habit)
Thompson grew up in Florida, where he spent his summers snook fishing and his winters at turkey camps. 'My Saturday mornings were in a dove field or a turkey blind or at a boat ramp, catching fish,' Thompson says. His desire to hunt and his wish to protect wild places are tightly bound. 'Everything I do is through the lens of conservation,' he says. Today, Thompson is mostly a duck hunter. 'I love ducks more than anyone you'll find. I don't want to shoot all the ducks in the world. I want to make sure there are plenty of ducks so I can shoot a bunch every year.'
This perspective, he says, is the same one a lot of hunters bring to the environment: they want to protect it to continue to do what they love. Though Thompson isn't a bear hunter—'I don't have any interest in hunting a bear,' he says— he believes science should guide wildlife management decisions.
And the scientists at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, who make the decisions about hunting Florida black bears: 'They're the best bear scientists I know,' Thompson says. A Florida black bear walking through a swamp of 500-year-old cypress tree on Bergeron's Green Glades West cattle ranch, adjacent to Big Cypress National Preserve and the Seminole Tribe of Florida's Big Cypress Reservation. The swamps fill with water during the summer and autumn rainy season. The bears in the Big Cypress subpopulation are the southernmost in the United States. Without the Florida Wildlife Corridor, bears in Big Cypress subpopulation and other wildlife like the Florida panther could be cut off from the rest of the state and country. Too few bears vs. too many
The FWC is one of the largest fish and wildlife conservation agencies in the nation, with a significant portion of its $600 million budget dedicated to wildlife research, habitat assessment and data collection and analysis. 'We're here to do good science,' says George Warthen, the agency's chief conservation officer.
Like Thompson, Warthen grew up in Florida and is an avid hunter. Hunting has been an important part of his conservation journey. 'What draws me to hunting is my connection to nature,' he says. 'I can't imagine leaving Florida because of my connection to the land.' The pull toward a 3 a.m. wakeup and early morning stints alone in the woods is not that different from the impulse that draws wildlife photographers, he says.
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Like many, Warthen advocates for allowing the data to guide decisions around Florida black bear protection—including possibly allowing the first black bear hunt in the state in a decade. 'As wildlife managers, we want to step in before an animal overpopulates,' Warthen says. 'When any wildlife species starts to reach the upper limits of what a habitat will support, overall health of the population can begin to decline because of increased stress on individuals competing for resources. This can lead to disease outbreaks, lower reproductive rates in females and increased infanticide by male bears. The combination of these factors can lead to declines in the population which are much harder for wildlife managers to predict, and therefore manage, for long-term sustainability of the population.'
Among the 40 states in the United States with resident black bear populations, Florida is one of only six that does not allow a regulated hunt. The other five cite low bear population numbers for why they prohibit bear hunts within their borders. Connecticut has roughly 1,200 bears; Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Ohio have less than 250 each. The eye of a young Florida bear cub, who was identified with its siblings by biologists from the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission during a den study. The cubs' location was known because their mother had been given a GPS collar the previous summer. Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission biologists Darcy Doran-Myers and Shelby Shiver carry Florida black bear cubs a short distance from their den in Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge to a clearing where the had space to study and record measurements for the cubs.
Warthen is careful to make a distinction between previous eras in the state's history, where unregulated hunting was detrimental to wildlife populations, and this modern one. 'Not a single game species has gone extinct—or come even close—in North America in the modern era of regulated hunting,' he says. 'Instead, if we look at deer and turkey as prime examples, we see where the population exploded as money from hunters went toward restoration.'
He believes the story of the Florida black bear can be a similar one: The more groups that want to protect the bear—from hunters to scientists to conservationists—the more people who will ultimately be in the bear's camp.
The vote on whether to move forward with the bear hunt is scheduled to take place at the FWC's next quarterly meeting, held August 13 and 14 in Havana, Florida. The commission's seven commissioners will vote on the issue. If it goes forward, the hunt will be held for three weeks in December, between December 6 and December 28, and span four Bear Management Units: central, east panhandle, north and south (with the exception of Big Cypress National Preserve, where bear hunting will not be permitted). Hunters will be allowed to hunt within the Florida Wildlife Corridor, which is composed of a mosaic of public and private lands, including many of the state's wildlife management areas. The hunting permits would be granted by a lottery process.
(Revered and feared: the history of Florida's elusive panthers)
The FWC has provided opportunities for the public to voice opinions on the hunt both in-person and on-line, and groups for and against the hunt plan to pack the room the during the commissioners' meeting. The anti-hunt group Bear Defenders has called for statewide protests on Saturday, August 9, with locations in 13 cities across Florida.
Many Floridians are passionately opposed to the hunt. 'It's going to be a disaster,' says Kate MacFall, Florida State Director of Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society.
MacFall remembers Florida's 2015 bear hunt, when 304 bears were killed in the first two days of the hunt—some of them cubs, some of them lactating mothers. FWC officials were forced to end the hunt early. MacFall calls it a fiasco. 'People were appalled. It made Florida look bad. The commission seems to have forgotten that, and we're headed down the wrong path again.' MacFall is particularly alarmed by the potential use of dogs, archery and baiting in upcoming bear hunts. 'We are asking the FWC to remove the worst kinds of cruelty,' she says. 'While they are moving ahead with the hunt, we do have an opportunity to make it less cruel.' Florida is set to decide whether to reinstate a limited hunt for black bears, a move that has drawn both supporters and critics. Where bears belong
The Florida Wildlife Federation has been involved with minimizing the potential harm and risks of a bear hunt, including baiting and artificial feed stations. The Federation's president and CEO, Sarah Gledhill, says that the group's focus is on prioritizing the coexistence between bears and humans through education and better waste management. Its biggest hope for the preservation of the Florida black bear? 'Conserving large tracts of land, building wildlife crossings and restoring habitat that has been degraded over time,' Gledhill says.
Conservation biologists sometimes ask themselves why they do what they do. Why they go through all the heartache and expense and hardship of saving a species—any species. Guthrie, who collared M34 as a graduate student and has since committed his career to protecting Florida bears, puts it simply: because they belong in this world.
'We get to share this planet with these fascinating, mysterious animals,' he says. 'No matter how closely we study them, we will never know what their lives are. But I'm still compelled by the mystery of their existence, how they live right under our noses and yet remain these enigmas, able to survive a thing like hibernation and raise their young for the next generation. I think some of us should dedicate our time and energy to making sure they last.'