By Christy Solo – ONPA 1st Place Award Winner for Best Local Column
This week’s crawly is a big un! They’re a mammal you may have seen, or you may not have seen. One you may want to see or one you may very much not want to see.
Meet the American Black Bear (Ursus americanus).
A black bear who had been spotted from Phoenix all the way up to Shady Cove was shot and killed by an Oregon State Police officer on July 11 in Shady Cove.
As bear encounters in habited areas here are rare and newsworthy, we thought this was a good opportunity to meet our black bear neighbors. There’s a lot to learn, so we’ll spread this out into two parts.
How likely are you to see a bear in our area? In general not bear-y likely (the recent situation being rare). Not because we have a shortage of black bears, but because here we do a good job of keeping them very wary of us (as they should be!)
In some areas such as Yosemite, black bears have become too accustomed to people and are in the Yogi Bear habit of raiding pic-a-nic baskets as well as campsites, cars, etc. This is more of a problem for the bears than for humans, because, “A fed bear, is a dead bear” (as we just learned). Bears who become too comfortable around humans end up being relocated or killed. Often relocated bears will just find their way back to the inhabited area so often…well, as we said, “A fed bear, is a dead bear” is a saying for a reason.
Fun fact: Oregon’s current black bear population is between 25K and 30K black bears. Most of those live from the coast to the Cascades. There are some in the eastern part of the state, but they prefer our more woodsy western landscape.
That said, I’ve personally seen exactly four black bears in my lifetime of wandering around in the Oregon woods. None of those sightings were…while I was wandering around in the woods. Three were bears crossing remote highways, one was across the Rogue from my house in Trail.
iNaturalist has 2,043 recorded sightings of bears in Oregon. “Sightings” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence though, because “sightings” include seeing not live bears, but also dead bears, bear tracks or just scat. Every photo’d poop counts as a “sighting.” The more you know…
Upshot, our bears are pretty people savvy and stay away from us. With about 25,000 of them meandering around mostly in just half of our state – it’s still quite newsworthy when one enters a populated area.
How people savvy (AKA fearful of) are Oregon’s black bears? Let’s compare: Colorado has 17K – 20K black bears, but they have 2,401 sightings! Bear for bear you are nearly twice as likely to see a black bear in Colorado as you are in Oregon. In Colorado black bears can be found in the western 2/3 of the state, so a bit more spread out than in Oregon.
There are 81 iNat sightings of black bears in Colorado Springs alone and they have a population of 500K people. Colorado bears are right at home in suburban yards and urban trash dumpsters. By comparison there are only 11 sightings in Eugene (none in Medford).
Oregon bears eschew the city life; they’d just like to be left alone with their berries. So, they are clearly true Oregonians!
Come back next week when we’ll dig our claws into lots of fun black bear facts!
