Lew Freedman
It is not as if black bears are colonizing Indiana, but at about a rate of one per year recently, they have made stealth appearances in the Hoosier State.
This is notable because the last time the 200- to 600-pound animals were considered regular residents may have been about 1850 and certainly no later than around 1870.
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources confirmed its most recent sighting of a black bear in northeast Vanderburgh County in the early morning dimness prior to sunrise June 27.
The bear was cutting across a property owner’s land and a photo was snapped, though due to the darkness, it was not brilliantly reproduced. The viewing was clear enough for DNR mammal expert Brad Westrich to identify the animal as a black bear.
This is the fourth individual black bear identified as poking its head into Indiana since 2015, even though there is no suggestion the wide-ranging animals from nearby states are hiring moving vans and setting up permanent living quarters to mate within the state’s boundaries.
Plus, the DNR received a subsequent July 8 report of a black bear roaming around nearby Pike County.
“That bear had moved over to Pike County,” Westrich said.
His office kept an eye on the mobile bear and determined it was the same bear, not an additional bear.
A report came in that a bear had invaded a dumpster, lured by some garbage from a July 4 holiday barbecue.
“It sort of hung around for three days,” Westrich said.
The bear seemed to move on after that. Subsequently, Westrich said the Indiana DNR heard of a bear print spotted in Henderson County, Kentucky, on July 19.
“It’s likely to be in Kentucky now,” Westrich said Monday after the trail of the visiting bear ran cold.
Black bears not rare across Midwest
Unlike the black bear’s much rarer United States cousin, the grizzly, ursus americanas do live in many territorial locations in the Midwest and indeed in a wide variety of climates across the nation.
Generally, favorable black bear habitat is in forest and mountain areas where comforting food, shelter and water are found.
Over the years, state officials received calls or notifications that a resident has spied a black bear, but they were viewed with skepticism. It is only in the last handful of years that state DNR authorities have been able to verify such sightings.
“This is Indiana’s fourth confirmed black bear,” Westrich said in the DNR’s stamp of approval that the showing of this bear within the state’s borders was not mere wishful thinking but a reality.
Yet it is not a terribly surprising reality. Having some black bears drift across the state line is something to be expected, he said, because bears are not map readers and don’t know if they are located in Missouri, Michigan, Ohio or Wisconsin, regular black bear home states in the area.
Although there are only an estimated 50 to 100 bears in Ohio and 540 to 840 in Missouri, black bears have proliferated around the country in recent years, and the population is trending up and in more diverse locales. Kentucky has about 1,000 black bears.
According to a recent study by a group called Wildlife Informer, black bears can be found in 41 of the 50 states. Indiana is one of nine states without a certain resident population, joining Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Delaware, Hawaii and North Dakota. Nebraska and South Dakota were classified as having “low/rare sightings.”
Rhode Island was said to possess between five and 10 bears, called a “new population” with the belief they migrated from Connecticut.
Indiana could find itself in such a position one day as a new home for black bears that stick around, but not yet, Westrich said.
This solo bear may well have surfaced closer to Elberfeld in Warrick County than any other town, traipsed into Pike County and through Vanderburgh County, was probably “just dipping into suitable habitat” for food, he said. The trio of counties abut in southern Indiana, and bears are known to roam 20 miles in a day.
Except for hunkering down at the dumpster, the bear, probably a young male, likely did not stay still very long. Most of the single bears seen of the last few years were probably of similar description, young males who were “just exploring,” Westrich said.
Black bears enjoy moving around when they mature sufficiently to split away from momma bear. They are not only feeling their oats but looking for the equivalent of oats to eat.
“Then their hormones drive them back to establishing a connection with a mate,” Westrich said.
More black bears in Alaska than anywhere
Given the vast differences in black bear population sizes in individual states, the state departments of natural resources and citizens have distinctly different relationships with the animals.
Bears do not fill out census data, so most counts posted by states are tabulated through a combination of on-ground study and estimates.
By far, the state with the most black bears is Alaska with a rough count of 100,000. Wyoming does not keep track of its black bears but is listed by Wildlife Informer as having a “robust population.”
Anyone living in Alaska can bump into a bear while taking out the trash, jogging, hiking, bicycling.
Stories abound. Two men who had just climbed a 5,000-foot peak in the Chugach Mountains on the outskirts of the state’s largest city of Anchorage were headed back to their car when a black bear was seen foraging for food. Nose down, it sniffed for food and not paying attention to them but was progressing directly toward them.
The men, armed with ice axes, the climbing tools, stood staring, waiting to see if they might be attacked and need the metal utensils as weapons. The bear never noticed them and eventually veered away.
Bob Hallinen, a longtime Alaskan photojournalist, snapped a popular picture that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News a few years ago. A call came into the authorities of a black bear rummaging through trash at a home near downtown Anchorage. Anchorage may have close to 300,000 people, but bears still pop up in the state’s largest city.
By the time Hallinen reached the scene, the bear had darted to the backyard and climbed a tree. The animal was quite photogenic.
“There’s definitely bears in Anchorage,” Hallinen said recently, “black bears and grizzlies.”
A site featuring black bear jokes relayed one saying: “What’s the difference between a black bear and a grizzly bear? If you climb a tree to escape, a black bear can climb up the tree and eat you. The grizzly bear will knock the tree down and eat you.”
Hallinen, a grizzled Alaskan, said in his experience, grizzlies can climb trees, too.
Hallinen said newcomers to Anchorage, the state’s one large city with tall buildings and traffic jams, are often ignorant that bears do show up in the city limits.
“The thing about Alaska is that turnover is pretty high,” he said of residents. “People who have been here for a while know.”
Some other states with large numbers of the black bears include Wisconsin, 24,000 to 31,000; California, 30,000; Washington, 25,000 to 30,000; Oregon, 25,000 to 30,000; Idaho, 20,000 to 30,000; North Carolina, 20,000; and Maine, 24,000 to 36,000. The nickname of the sports teams representing the University of Maine in Orono is the Black Bears.
In such states where the black bear is much more common than in Indiana, a resident, especially one hiking in the mountains, hunting in the forest or simply residing in a rural area, is more prone to seeing the species up close.
The views of black bears in Indiana come as a surprise and almost always are fleeting, Westrich said.
“They usually are driving to work,” Westrich said of such people who eye one. “They see it or glimpse it from the back porch.”
If a black bear is noticed and becomes aware of it, it is most likely to flee, seeking cover.
“Black bears are very timid,” Westrich said.
But not always. Author Bill Bryson, who wrote a popular book about the Appalachian Trail, called “A Walk in the Woods,” took note of bears’ unpredictable nature and threat level.
“All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry,” he wrote. “If they want to kill you and eat you, they can. That doesn’t happen often, but — and here is the absolutely salient point — once would be enough.”
More often, bears lose out in encounters with humans, whether shot as prey, punished for behavior or simply victims of accidents on roads.
In 2018, a black bear was struck by a car on Interstate 64 in Indiana, though it did not die from the impact on the spot.
“It wasn’t killed immediately,” Westrich said.
Some days later, however, the bear was found dead “20 or so miles away.”
Black bears do kill
Black bears are regarded as less vicious than grizzly bears, but bear-human encounters do have sad endings for people.
The first confirmed bear fatality in North America was recorded in August 1784 in New Hampshire when an 8-year-old boy was attacked by a 3-year-old black bear. The child was dragged away, and his partially eaten body was recovered a day later.
The most recent recorded black bear kill on the continent took place in Colorado on April 30 when a 39-year-old woman was attacked while walking her dogs.
Any bear attack producing a fatality makes national or international news. Any bear attack resulting in a person’s hospitalization usually does, too.
Legendary outdoors writer Russell Annabel years ago wrote an article about how frequently he encountered black bears invading his hunting camps.
The story, reprinted in the current issue of Sports Afield, includes descriptions of riding horseback back to camp only to find a bear in one of the tents, a story of how one bear repeatedly slinked into his camp in Alaska trying to steal his boots and another time watching a male bear introduce a female bear to the skill of biting into canned food and sucking out the contents.
Once, he wrote, he and another man were out on a hunt only to return to camp in time to watch bears tearing it apart. Annabel called that “humiliating.”
Often, he said, the bears aren’t even hungry but just romp through camps wrecking them for pleasure.
“My conclusion, regarding their thievery, is that it must be, at least partly, a kid of screwball bruin sport,” Annabel wrote. “Plunder excites them. They lose their normal caution and savvy.”
As may be expected given the distribution of black bears, conflicts are more common in such places as Alaska or Wyoming and in other densely populated bear states. Bears routinely wander into communities in Wyoming and regularly cross paths with people in locations such as Yellowstone National Park.
In mid-July, Wyoming Game and Fish officials euthanized a black bear in Sheridan after it was trapped a second time and returned to the city seeking food.
Wyoming officials stress carrying of bear spray canisters for hikers and hunters in the wild, and there is a bear spray container concession in Yellowstone.
In a black bear confrontation, individuals are discouraged from running away, told to stand still, wave arms, make noise and if in the company of others cluster together to inflate the size of the group. If attacked, people are encouraged to fight back, not play dead.
Alaska allows grizzly bear and black bear hunting. The debate over grizzly bear hunting has raged in Wyoming for years and is not currently permitted. But black bear hunting is permitted in several states, and hunters can obtain advice easily.
Petersen’s Hunting rates Alaska, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina and Oregon as the best states to hunt black bears.
“The more effort you put into masking your scent, the bigger the black bears will be coming into your target zone,” wrote Gary Skrzek on a website called Black Bear Heaven.
Black bears have extraordinary senses of hearing and smell, so they must be fooled into range. Skrzek says black bears have 2,100 times the smelling power of a human.
Rare as the Indiana black bear sightings may be, the state DNR jumps right on any potential threat.
“Seeking out easily accessible food is normal behavior for many wild animals,” Westrich said. “Unfortunately, bears can become sick or even die when they eat items from our garbage.”
People are advised to keep tight lids on trash so bears do not associate their homes with food and lose natural concern of being around humans. That’s when problems arise.
“I’d say the humans cause the trouble,” Westrich said of the most common source of any incident.
Wait till you see grizzlies
Despite the recent Indiana bear reports, odds are high an individual will not see a bear in person within the state.
Some 150-plus years after black bears exited the scene, there is a certain level of incredulity that any appear on the landscape at all.
Of course, the same will be said when the first grizzly shows its snout in Indiana.
“If we see a grizzly in Indiana, oh man, I’d be shocked,” Westrich said. “A lot of people would be really shocked.”