Black bears are moving into the neighborhood. How do we coexist?
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Why are black bears suddenly showing up in suburban backyards?
Hey, it's Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Black bears have been popping up in unexpected places. Raiding the backyard grill. He munching. Aww. Is that barbecue sauce he's eating? Breaking into cars.
Oh my gosh!
Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Nursing their cubs on someone's patio furniture.
Mama has found her favorite chair. Has her foot up, baby's in her lap nursing. Is this not adorable?
One of the relatively new places where these encounters are happening is in the southern U.S. After being hunted nearly to extinction, black bear populations are rebounding there, and bear territory is expanding to include people's backyards. Cassandra Stevenson, a reporter for the Tennessee Lookout based in Nashville, reported on how this is playing out in the states along the lower Mississippi River, like Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas, where black bears are becoming more and more common. Cassandra, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. Cassandra, how did you get turned on to this story?
I came across a lot of social media chatter in West Tennessee reporting different black bear sightings in places where people didn't typically expect to see black bears. In Tennessee, they're really common in the eastern, more mountainous portion of the state. But people were posting pictures of black bears munching on some corn in a cornfield. You know, running through a golf course, caught on ring cameras in people's backyards. So I started looking into why the bears were being seen, you know, in the western portion of the state and found that that's actually their historic habitat, right? They were abundant throughout the state of Tennessee and many other states in the southeast before overhunting and habitat destruction reduced their numbers drastically.
Yeah, so what is the history of bears in this region?
So bears were abundant in this region back before settlement, basically. And as people settled in the lower Mississippi River Basin, some of their habitat was changed, destroyed, and their population numbers dropped significantly. Sometimes, you know, to the point where they were almost non-existent in certain states. Really? Yeah, I think Missouri in like the 1890s thought that they might have been completely extirpated, meaning like just kind of hunted out of existence in that state.
How did reporter Cassandra Stephenson first notice the surge of bear sightings in West Tennessee?
So now, you know, now obviously we have all these sightings. What has happened to the population since and what helped them rebound?
It kind of depends by state. But in the 1930s through kind of 1960s, there were a lot of efforts to regulate hunting more. A lot of states actually stopped bear hunting for a period of time. In some states like Mississippi, it hasn't started back up again. And then in some cases, states tried to kind of boost their population by bringing in bears from Canada or Minnesota. How did that go? It didn't really work out too well. There was a study a few years ago that showed that there's still some DNA evidence that maybe some bears in Louisiana might have some of the DNA of some of the bears that were brought in, like literally trucked in from those other places. But newspaper clippings from around the 1950s and 60s when that happened show that quite a few of those bears were killed or, you know, died or wandered away because bears have really expansive home ranges.
So Cassandra, what's your take home from this reporting? Does this feel like with growing populations, there's a new problem to solve? Or how are you thinking about it?
Yeah, in talking to a lot of the state wildlife agencies, they kind of looked at this as one sort of success and that, you know, these animals that were greatly overhunted, they're populations are coming back. But they also encouraged people to start thinking as though, you know, bears are already their neighbors, because it will be a bit of an adjustment for people to have bears living alongside them.
Absolutely. Cassandra, thank you for walking us through this story. Yeah, absolutely. Happy to. Cassandra Stevenson, reporter for the Tennessee Lookout.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why are black bears suddenly showing up in suburban backyards?
0:02–2:56
2
How did reporter Cassandra Stephenson first notice the surge of bear sightings in West Tennessee?
2:56–6:04
3
What historical factors caused black bear populations to disappear from the Mississippi River Basin?
6:04–8:04
4
Which conservation policies helped black bear numbers rebound after the 20th‑century decline?
8:04–9:57
5
Why do some bears become bold and habituated while others stay shy?
9:57–12:05
6
What are the most effective trash‑management and attractant‑reduction practices to keep bears out of yards?
12:05–13:40
7
How can aversive conditioning and hazing prevent bears from becoming neighborhood regulars?
13:40–16:29
8
What lessons do carnivore experts draw from global big‑cat conflicts to guide human‑bear coexistence?
16:29–17:59
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Science Friday
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