TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — On August 3, Florida Fish and Wildlife will begin selling permits for the state’s first bear hunt in more than two decades.
The hunt, approved by the FWC in a 5-1 vote, will allow hunters to kill bears starting on October 24. The state estimates hunters will kill about 320 bears, a move FWC said will help control the bear population.
But 9 Investigates discovered that FWC doesn’t know exactly how many bears live in the state.
“Most animal populations should be estimated every generation, which is roughly every eight years for bears,” said Sarah Barrett, of FWC’s Black Bear Management Program. “We have updated numbers on four of the subpopulations and are collecting the data for the remaining three subpopulations.”
In its decision to reopen hunting, FWC used a mixture of data from 2002 and 2014. FWC said its current study of the bear population won’t be available until the summer of 2016, almost a year after the hunt has ended.
“If they’re going to hunt, they may as well kill them all because they have nothing to eat,” Lake County resident David Baumgardner said.
Baumgardner’s family has lived in Lake County for three generations. He said his family has always shared the land with the bears, but recently they have had far more interactions.
“I have seen more bears, morning, noon, afternoon and night in the past six years as the bears scurry about trying to find native food sources than I have in the previous 65 years,” Baumgardner said.
Some residents said they believe food sources for the bears are vanishing. Part of the diet of the Florida black bear consists of saw palmetto berries and the acorns from live oak trees. Florida sells permits for people to harvest saw palmetto berries, while live oak trees are disappearing from the state because of new development.
FWC said it is working to manage both the bear population and the traditional food sources for the bears.
Conservation groups have threatened to sue the state to stop the bear hunts, saying the hunts are unneeded for a species that until recently, was protected under the law.