Bad News for Bears

Best if feds embrace care, safety of Florida’s black bears

Originally published at www.orlandosentinel.com on March 18, 2016.

Chances are that, like the great majority of Floridians, you’ve never seen one of the state’s 3,000 or so Florida black bears.

Or, perhaps as our growing population spews farther and farther into our ever-shrinking wild places, maybe you’ve spotted one of the burly critters rummaging through unsecured garbage.

Either way, whether your daily life is increasingly intertwined with bears or you live in an urban high-rise, you have a compelling stake in how we evolve our relationship with these beautiful creatures that were once a symbol of all things wild and wonderful here in the Sunshine State.

How well we manage our still largely invisible bears will have direct and sweeping impacts on the size and health of the natural spaces we leave behind for future generations.

The numbers are powerful: the 25,000-acre home range of a single Florida black bear can also be home to hundreds of bobcats, foxes and deer, thousands of birds, 2.5 million trees, and more than 6 trillion insects.

As a result, the conservation implications of the state’s escalating failure to adequately protect the habitat of this umbrella species are profound.

Twelve years ago, when federal officials denied Endangered Species Act protections to Florida black bears, they noted strong state protections were in place to safeguard the bears living in seven highly isolated populations.

But the state’s decision four years ago to remove the bear from the state list of threatened species has resulted in a chain of events that has quickly pushed the bear further toward extinction, in the process accelerating the state’s disturbing recent trend of reducing protections and funding for the state’s few remaining wild places.

With no state or federal protections in place, bears are now under tremendous threat.

Florida’s Legislature has exacerbated the problem by cutting funding to Florida’s premier land-acquisition program, Florida Forever, by 94 percent since 2008. In 2012–2013 those cuts resulted in the state acquiring just 2,637 acres across the entire state while spending not a single dime on critical conservation easements that could have been acquired to protect agricultural lands that serve as important corridors between the increasingly isolated Florida black-bear subpopulations.

The state also recently changed its policy regarding so-called “problem” or “conflict” bears, limiting use of translocation in favor of simply killing healthy bears that were habituated to human sources of food. The new policy, called the “Accelerated Approaches to Human-Bear Conflict” resulted in 108 bears being killed by wildlife managers in 2015, compared to only 26 bears in year 2014.

In October, the thousands of hunters who signed up for the first Florida black bear hunt in 20 years killed at least 304 Florida black bears — approximately 10 percent of the estimated population of 3,000 to 3,500 bears, including lactating mother bears.

These troubling policies, coupled with the ever-increasing numbers of vehicles and roads that led to 169 bear deaths last year, made 2015 an extremely deadly year for the Florida black bear. In all, humans were responsible for killing at least 590 Florida black bears last year.

With the human population in Florida projected to increase by nearly 50 percent by 2060, the threats to the Florida black bear’s future are sure to worsen. That’s why this week the Center for Biological Diversity, where I work, was joined by six leading carnivore scientists and more than a dozen conservation groups in filing a scientific petition asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the bear under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The bottom line is that with careful, science-based management, we Floridians can co-exist with a healthy bear population. But instead of simply killing more bears — which a growing body of research suggests will not reduce conflicts — we must better connect our bear populations and work harder to make sure we don’t unwittingly make our neighborhoods attractive to bears foraging for food.

We can do it. And the majority of Floridians want to do it.

Jaclyn Lopez is the Center for Biological Diversity’s Florida director.

Originally published at www.orlandosentinel.com on March 18, 2016.