The Florida Black Bear

When we think of Florida, the animals most likely to come to mind are alligators, dolphins, manatees, and a certain rodent with big ears, but one of our largest and most imposing animal neighbors in the Sunshine State is the American black bear (Ursus americanus). In Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, that means the Florida black bear, one of eighteen subspecies of black bears in North America.

The Florida Black Bear: My Neighbor

Along some of the older highways through less developed areas of Florida there are signs warning about bears. Like bear subspecies throughout North America, however, the Florida black bear is the one that needs a warning. People, together with their cars and highways, are leaving bears fewer places to roam, forage, and reproduce.

Unique among North America's big mammals, bears can walk on their hind legs. This behavior makes them seem somewhat more like us, but at the same time, it makes them seem larger, scarier. Still, there is no record of the death of a human as the result of an attack by a black bear. In fact, unless a bear has cubs or is cornered, it will do its best to avoid contact with human beings.

The Florida Black Bear: Food and Environmental Needs

Bears eat mainly plant matter-such as nuts, betties, roots, and grasses-but they are omnivorous opportunists. Despite its legendary appetite for honey; it has a similar appetite for bees, ants, and other insects. It eats what it can find-seeds in birdfeeders in Florida, nectar in hummingbird feeders in Colorado. Birds and their eggs, small mammals, carrion, and of course, the contents of picnic baskets are accepted. Polar bears make nuisances of themselves around garbage dumps in Alaska, and black bears become pests in campgrounds. But, a tough old freelance writer would be declined.

Bears are opportunistic about environments as well, wet or dry, upland or low. They will make a den of anything they can find-a hollow tree trunk or a log, a cave or a hole in the ground. The main problem faced by bears today is that a bear needs a lot of environment. The females can get along with about ten square miles, but the males need more than sixty square miles.

To maintain a genetically healthy breeding population, then, requires hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory. Bears may follow some sort of instinctive corridors linking their basic territories, but if so, it is likely that this ursine interstate has been severely disrupted by the human highway system. It is not so much the loss of territory as the loss of links between territories that has led to the loss of some three-quarters of the bear population in the southeast. Since females mate only every other year and rarely produce more than two cubs, population growth, even under optimal conditions, is slow.

The Florida Black Bear: Extinction Is Forever

Still, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not classify the black bear as endangered or even threatened, although it has identified territories where individual populations are at risk. Since linking bear territories, unfortunately, is not as easy as linking Internet sites, bears in isolated environments face the dangers of inbreeding. Some researchers track bears with electronic collars to see whether they can still use some of their traditional routes.

Extinction is an ongoing story of which the alligator and the black bear are recent, contrasting chapters. The alligator has returned from near extinction to be a nuisance in much of its natural range, now crowded with human beings, while the black bear may be losing its struggle for survival. Like the western mountain lion and the Florida cougar, the Florida black bear is a large animal needing a large habitat in an area crowded with people. In fact, it is the largest surviving wild animal in the Southeast, and there may not be enough room for the bears and the people to live together.

The Florida Black Bear: Lessons for Us

In many stories of the native people of North America, Bear is a wise spirit, a healer, a teacher, and of course, he was one of the characters in Joel Chandler Harris's politically incorrect retellings of African-American folk tales (more). Although it may be hard to see much wisdom in the poor, crowded out raiders of campground trashcans, Bear still brings nobility to our environment and to our lives. Indeed, this scrappy, adaptable old spirit of the woods, eking out an existence in our garbage heaps, may be giving us a warning.

Does the Florida black bear hibernate?

If you read the comments, you will notice that Linda Louise Johnson (source page here) asks about Florida black bears, "How do they hibernate in winter if there is no winter?" I realized that it was important enough that I wanted to include the answer in the article, but I am also leaving our original exchange in the comments.

I honestly did not know about bear hibernation in Florida. It turns out that in Florida and throughout the southeast, the black bear just goes into a lethargy for a few weeks, based more on low food supplies than low temperature, and that denning bears in Florida are conscious and can run away if approached.

I have also written about other unlikely Florida residents, "The Wild Monkeys of Central Florida," which you can read about here.