Over the last 20 years, black bears have made a comeback in Maryland, particularly in the western part of the state, and, more recently, their range has started to expand to the exurbs and suburban areas. There have been black bear sightings in parts of Baltimore County for 10 years, and state biologists suspect that sows have started to give birth to cubs in western Montgomery County.
If you're a naturalist and lover of wildlife, you probably see that as good news, considering the history: Maryland's black bear population nearly disappeared after World War II; the state banned bear hunting in 1953.
But since 2004, with bear numbers slowly rising, the state has held an annual hunt in the westernmost counties, Allegany and Garrett.
Now, the hunter's range is about to grow along with that of the black bear.
For this year's four-day hunt (Oct. 24-27), the Department of Natural Resources will add two counties and increase the number of permits by 50 percent. The hunt will move into Washington and Frederick counties, and the number of hunting permits will go from 500 to 750.
Is this really necessary? Are bears really causing problems?
A lot of us raised these questions more than a decade ago, when the hunt started. Critics called it unnecessary and implored the governor and legislators to reject demands for a hunt. E. Joseph Lamp, who served on DNR's Wildlife Advisory Commission from 1998 to 2012, decried the hunt as a "senseless trophy killing" in an op-ed published in The Baltimore Sun last fall. He contended that the hunt has not been justified by credible science or sound population estimates.
He reiterated that position when I contacted him this week. "It's all about money and promotion of blood sports," Lamp says. "Randomly killing bears for sport has nothing at all to do with the removal of an occasional rogue bear that may be invading a home or causing damage to a farmer's livestock or fields. DNR has the ability to do that at any time and teams ready to go."
Harry Spiker is the state's bear expert, our chief bear biologist. He says DNR's management strategy is to use the hunt merely to slow the growth of the bear population. "We're not trying to curb it downward," he says.
The four westernmost counties are considered Maryland's "occupied bear range," meaning sows regularly give birth to cubs there.
There is believed to be something like 1,000-plus adult black bears in Garrett and Allegany counties, with additional numbers of them in Frederick and Washington. Bears have been seen on the outskirts of the city of Frederick, Spiker says.
His population estimates are based on a combination of genetic science, population modeling, tracking within a series of "scent stations," den surveys, reports of sightings and "nuisance activity" by the public and even road-kill counts. The state of Maryland spends about $1,000 annually on canned sardines to keep track of black bears along familiar "routes" in their established haunts. Punctured cans of oily sardines hang from trees about a half-mile apart, and the state's bear biologists check these "scent stations" to determine if bears are still present.
The state also uses DNA sampling in its calculations.
"Wildlife science is not an exact science," Spiker says. But his tracking and research leads him to believe that Maryland's black bear population grows at about 12.5 percent annually.
There are other considerations to support a hunt, Spiker says. One is "biological carrying capacity," the maximum number of bears that a given habitat can sustain. The other, perhaps less quantifiable, is a cultural consideration: How many bears can a given human population tolerate?
Some people consider the mere presence of a bear, even an occasional sighting, a nuisance and a threat. Others have more tangible complaints -- crop damage, for instance, or bears getting into household trash, and even getting into households.
Indeed, Spiker says, about 10 times a year, black bears carry out home invasions. They get into screened-in porches or garages. Some get into kitchens, sometimes during the day, sometimes at night. One stuck his head through a flexible pet door of a house in Garrett County while the human inside was watching television.
Still, Spiker says, he's noticed that, as people in the westernmost counties grow more accustomed to seeing bears, they become more accepting of them. As they should. Attacks are rare. Black bears are generally secretive and shy. They're more interested in the trash humans produce than in humans. Up to five months of the year, they're in hibernation.
We -- and that includes the skittish and the easily freaked-out -- far outnumber Ursus americanus; we take up a lot of space in the black bear's historic range. Coexistence seems like a fine ideal, but an ideal premised now on an annual hunt.