Black Bears And Other Wildlife

Written By - Tom Remington - 06/29/2007

Link to Original Article here

Now there is a headline you are not going to see very often, if at all. It is also one that will rile the dander of just about every antihunter and animal rights group that believe humans should take a back seat to animals and let them run nilly willy over the countryside.

All we ever hear about these days when it comes to human to wild animal encounters is how man is encroaching on wildlife and that we are to blame for forcing these poor innocent creatures into our backyards to eat our garbage, kill our pets and attack children.

What if it\'s not our fault? What if the cause of these increases in coyote attacks in New Jersey and bear attacks in Utah, Pennsylvania and Kentucky were just the result of too many animals?

Don\'t get me wrong. I do think that we are building far too many homes and developing too many areas that once was fine habitat for many species of wildlife but if we are to blame ourselves for these attacks, maybe we should consider that we have done such a great job managing our game and wildlife that we now have too many.

I\'ve written several articles of late concerning bear attacks on humans. The latest being that of 11-year old Samuel Ives in Utah while camping with family. One particular article, \"Expert Advice On Dealing With Black Bears\", relates to an article written in the Bangor Daily News by John Holyoke about how to deal with black bears. Holyoke talked with Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife field expert on bears, Randy Cross.

In that article, I took issue with a comment cross made about the frequency of bear attacks.

\"I think it\'s remote out there [in Utah] as well,\" he said. \"It\'s not like it happens five times a year or even five times in a decade. We\'re talking about something that happens less than five times in a century… almost anywhere you want to go.\"

The article began a mini debate. Reader Richard Paradis wanted to know if I had links to support my claim that bear attacks occurred far more often than Cross suggested. I had forgotten to include the links in the original story and added them later in the comments section. Here again are those links.

Southeastern Outdoors, where they claim that there have been 52 known fatal black bear attacks in North America in the last 100 years.

Cooperative Extension Service of the University of Washington. This article claims there have been 45 black bear deaths since 1900.

Ithaca37, another Black Bear Blog reader wrote:

It is not as much bans on hunting as it is urban sprawl that has led to increased human-wild animal contacts. As people push farther[sic] out into \"the woods\", the less space there is for wildlife.

The fact that there have been more attacks recently doesn\'t mean anything unless you look at urban sprawl and what has happened to the number of national park visitors. I do not know if there are more people visiting national parks or not, but until someone can demonstrate that there has not been a significant change in other factors there can be no positive link between number of bear attacks and hunting bans.

I responded to Ithaca37 that there had to be some degree of a correlation between encroachment and the closing of hunting lands by landowners sprawling further out into the woods, resulting in less hunting opportunities. With less hunting comes an increase in bear populations.

Paradis, having some kind of trouble last evening posting further comments, sent me an email with information in it about bear populations and changes in hunting regulations.

The argument here is whether or not bears are encroaching on us or we are encroaching on them. Paradis points out an article that appears in the Foggy Mountain Guide Service website that was written by Craig McLaughlin, Ph.D., Wildlife Biologist, Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

The statewide population was estimated at 6,000-9,000 in 1979, and season restrictions were implemented to guard against over harvests. By 1984, improved information on bear densities yielded a revised statewide estimate of 18,000 bears. The 1985 population was estimated at 21,000 bears, but renewed interest in hunting and escalating harvests during the late 1980s reduced the population to 18,000 bears by 1989.

Additional restrictions on hunting season length have increased bear survival during the 1990s, and the population increased to 22,000-23,000 bears in 1998.

I\'ll revert back to the Bangor Daily News piece in which Cross points out that Maine probably has fewer human/bear encounters because of hunting pressure that helps instill that fear of man by bears.

\"The biggest problem I think you have with bears becoming dangerous are bears that have lost their fear of humans,\" Cross said. \"The habituation of bears usually begins with inadvertent feeding of bears and escalates from there. But once bears have lost their fear of humans, they\'re a much more dangerous animal at that point.\"

Cross said Maine\'s hunting heritage may be a factor in reducing bear-human contact here, in that the most aggressive, bold bears are generally among the bruins that are shot each year.

Doesn\'t this further explain why there are increased human/bear encounters in areas where bears are not hunted than in those that aren\'t? Maine has a relatively small human population in proportion to land mass but one of the largest black bear populations in the U.S. One would think Maine would have more bear/human attacks than most other states.

Even to further confirm the 23,000 bear population estimate for Maine, back in 2004 during the big bear hunting referendum debate, opponents of that initiative put together a television commercial in which Jennifer Vashon, a wildlife biologist for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, made the following statement.

\"I\'m Jennifer Vashon, the state\'s bear biologist. Maine\'s bear population is healthy and growing. Today we have over 23,000 black bears - one of the largest bear populations in the country. Our bear hunt is highly regulated and closely monitored by wildlife experts\".

We have to ask ourselves who\'s encroaching on whom? As Paradis pointed out in his email, a 400% increase in bear numbers is huge.

I believe the fact that we have nearly a 400% increase in bear population in Maine over a relatively short period of time to be the most significant cause.

Cause, is referring to the cause for human/bear encounter increases.

Maine is only one case. I have no statistics on other states as far as increases in bear populations. On the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources website, officials estimate the black bear population at between 2,000 and 4,000.

Bunnell says Utah\'s black bear population numbers between 2,000 to 4,000 bears. \"While that may sound like a lot of bears, our bear population is actually small compared to many other states,\" he says.

Bunnell says bears can be found in almost any mountainous area in Utah.

There is one other issue to address in which Ithaca37 brought up. This was the one of whether there was any increase in visitors to National Parks that would add to the increase in bear/human encounters.

Paradis pointed out an article published in the Portland Press Herald in July of 2006 that states that visits to Maine\'s parks have taken a sharp decline and that it is a reflection of the trend nationwide.

Use of Maine\'s two premier parks - Baxter State Park and Acadia National Park - has fallen sharply since 2000, a drop that mirrors national trends and is blamed by some on an exploding preoccupation with the Internet and entertainment media…

Attendance at Acadia dropped 20 percent during the same period, from 2.5 million to 2 million….

The study found that park attendance increased nationally from 1939 to 1987. The steady decline since then has accompanied an explosion in electronic entertainment.

If this is true, then isn\'t this further evidence that there are more bears, perhaps more than officials estimate and that there is far more competition among the animals for food and good habitat forcing them more into our back yards and campsites?

I\'ll say it again. We need to slow down the sprawl and building of homes in the middle of wildlife habitat but we also need to stop completely blaming human encroachment on wildlife as the only cause for increased human/wildlife encounters.

We do a great job overall in managing our wild animals, perhaps too good. Demand is increasing from U.S. citizens to be able to drive around a view wildlife. With better science and management skills, decreased access to land for hunting, urban sprawl and development and continued insistence by anti-hunting and animal rights groups to ban hunting and trapping, this trend toward human/animal conflict will continue to rise. With this rise, fish and game officials will have to more closely monitor wildlife populations and manage accordingly.

I want to thank Richard Paradis for taking the time to email me the links with the very helpful information on them.