Bear, Bear, Everywhere
Black Bears and Suburbia in Vermont
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In this edition, I discuss some of the nuances of Vermont’s growing black bear population and where it is potentially headed as the state develops.
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Vermont Bears in the Press
Every spring in Vermont, local news outlets report on black bear sightings and encounters. Bears get into trash, snatch bird feeders, wreck chicken coups, and destroy backyard beehives. Bear food sources aren’t widely available, so they’re looking for other food as they emerge from dormancy.
Human settlement encroaches on traditional bear habitat. Medium-high elevation unfragmented forests are conducive to a healthy bear population. Another habitat conducive to bears is exurban development (low-density pockets of housing), an increasingly common form of housing development in Vermont.
Black bear traveling through the woods. Photo captured on a game camera behind my house.
History
Bears were once considered a nuisance species. Early settlers and bears clashed, and farms expanded further into the mountains from the flatlands and floodplains of the Champlain and Connecticut valleys. As farms replaced forests, bears were trapped, killed, and generally pushed out of the region. Farmers didn’t widely adopt fertilizer, and when a parcel’s productivity decreased, another chunk of forest was cleared and plowed for food or livestock production.
Vermont had a bear bounty from 1831 to 1975, with payments between $2 and $15. In 1941, the state designated black bears a game animal, and between 1941 and 1975, the state paid out a total of $17,389 to people who suffered damage from bears.
According to Vermont Fish and Wildlife’s (VTF&W) Big Game Management Plan, the Department has stabilized the black bear population to between 4,500 and 6,000. However, VTF&W recently revised this estimate to between 7,000 and 8,500.
Source: Vermont Fish & Wildlife Bear Population Estimates
The chart below shows that the VT bear harvest has also steadily increased since the early 1990s.
Source: 2022 Black Bear Harvest Summary Report
Black bear numbers are rising, and hunter harvests of these animals are also increasing, which makes sense; there are more bears around for hunters to shoot. My observations of increased reports of human-bear interactions also trends with VTF&W data.
Source: Big Game Report
VTF&W indicates that the number of negative human-bear interactions has grown disproportionately to the number of bears, meaning that while the number of bears is generally leveling off, the number of bear incidents is increasing at a rate that exceeds any increase in bear population. In their own words, “The record number of bear-human interactions is taxing the department beyond its capacity to provide direct and effective assistance.” (Big Game Report).
What else is happening?
Bears like forests and can thrive as elusive animals in remote areas of the Green Mountains and Essex County (the most sparsely populated VT county). At the same time, it's clear that bears living outside these zones are also doing just fine, and they don’t need large undisturbed areas (as stated in some VTF&W literature). We may then consider ideal bear habitats not only the beech-laden forests of the Greens but also the exurban regions of the state.
As VTF&W has said, “human demographics have also shifted in Vermont with increased urbanization”; while they posit this has resulted in the effect of more interactions, it's likely also the cause. Consider the following statewide trends:
Private property closed to hunting (i.e., “Posted”)
Fewer hunters in the state
Vocal opposition to bear hounds (hunting or pursuing bears with dogs elevates a bear’s fear of humans)
Forest fragmentation is increasing, creating the perfect cover for a bear that wants to hide between food sources.
Bears are adaptable and they are adapting to Vermont’s changing landscape. Below are maps showing New Jersey’s expanding bear population, with the bright red areas indicating bear territory expansion.
Source: New Jersey Fish & Wildlife
Like Vermont, New Jersey’s bear population has grown; they find suitable habitats as hunter numbers decrease and exurban development increases. Do bears need extensive, undisturbed forests to thrive? It doesn’t appear so. Data is available indicating that low-density housing is a habitat bears benefit from since there’s a “refuge of large hardwood forests and a scattering of homes just dense enough that a tasty snack from a garbage can or backyard bird feeder is only a short distance away.” (UConn Today). Simply put, “bears are adjusting to living in a habitat shared with humans.”
Wildland-Urban Interface
The wildland-urban interface (WUI) “is the zone where human development meets or intermingles with undeveloped wildland vegetation” (USDA Forest Service) and is a measure of urbanization and forest fragmentation. The USDA’s analysis of the WUI in Vermont indicates that development converted forests to WUI conditions at a rate of 5.5% per decade between 1990 and 2010 (Vermont Forests 2017). Forest fragmentation and exurban expansion have increased during this period, with non-WUI forests shrinking from 3.6 to 3.0 million acres. Borrowing from Uconn’s College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources definition of exurban areas (areas with between 6-50 houses/km2), VT is predominantly an exurban state with all counties except Essex County meeting these criteria.
Data compiled from the 2020 US Census
As statewide initiatives to expand housing stock gain traction, we should expect to continue heading in a similar trajectory as other states in the northeast like New Jersey and Connecticut, not only regarding exurban development and forest fragmentation but also increased human-bear encounters as we create conditions they’re well-adapted to thriving within.
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