Such a possibility could soon become part of a wrenching debate arising from experts' recent conclusion that Florida's largest land mammal no longer faces extinction and can join black bears in 30 other states as a game species.
At the same time, long-standing worries about the bears' fate are being shaded by questions of how many are enough before Orlando-area suburbanites begin to think of them as vermin.
As a vivid symbol of Florida's wild side, the black bear evokes wildly different feelings from people. Is that a living version of Winnie the Pooh or Smokey Bear pressing its cuddly mug against the kitchen window? Or a fearsome beast that can rip limbs from trees with claws powered by
testosterone and Popeye-like forearms?
Come June, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is to decide whether to take the bear off the state's threatened-species list, which shields it from hunting and, to a lesser degree, land development.
"I'm sure it's not going to be a popular one for FWC to make, but they are eventually going to," predicts Daryle Blankenship, an outdoorsman who lives near Titusville and expects to hunt the animals one day. "If you don't control their population, all you are going to end up with is a bunch of sick, skinny bears."
Not so, says Doria Gordon, the Nature Conservancy's conservation-science director in Florida. Bears are still imperiled by too little habitat and a lack of genetic mixing because they are cut off from each other. And by their ongoing slaughter on Florida roads."I don't think Florida black bears can sustain hunting," Gordon said.
Whatever the bear's future, its recovery in recent decades has stunned leading researchers and mystified residents of suburbs north of Orlando. Increasingly, homeowners' yards are home to the shy creatures, which are pushing out from the Wekiva and St. Johns river basins and nearby
Ocala National Forest.
Florida's bear population is thought to have totaled about 11,500 before Europeans settled in the state. But by the 1950s, unlimited hunting and deforestation had slashed the head count to as few as 500. Hunting was stopped in most parts of the state in 1971. Three years later, with the Florida population down to an estimated 300 bears, the species was declared threatened except in parts of North Florida. And even there, hunting was closed after 62 bears were killed during the 1993-94 season.
Florida authorities finally banned the sport not because the animals were skittering toward extinction — their numbers had already begun to rebound — but because a poll had found that 61 percent of Floridians were opposed to shooting bears, compared with only 11 percent in favor.
State officials, still mindful of that lopsided result, are updating Florida's bear-management plan in such a way that it can accommodate both the growing number of bears and complaints about them and the likelihood that most residents remain opposed to hunting.
"We know we don't operate in a bubble," said David Telesco, Florida's bear-management coordinator.
A draft of the plan does not call for hunting; instead, it recommends that Floridians consider it as a way to control the state's bear population.
Florida is home to as many as 3,500 bears. Nearly a third belong to a single group that thrives in the rich habitat of the Ocala forest and along the Wekiva and St. Johns rivers. Biologists think the most intense hunting could occur there.
Michael R. Pelton, emeritus professor of wildlife at the University of Tennessee, said Florida's situation is not unusual. Black-bear populations are stable or growing in all 41 of the states in which they are found, he said.
"In the '70s, when we were doing our research, we never dreamed they would respond as positively," Pelton said.
Having survived the worst of times in federally protected woods, the bears began to multiply after hunting was restricted or banned and additional forests were restored and preserved.
Until the 1980s, researchers had fretted over the "carrying capacity" of those forests; that is, their ability to sustain bears. But since then, they have begun worrying about "cultural carrying capacity," or the ability of humans to tolerate bears.
Central Florida's cultural carrying capacity has increasingly been tested in recent years as home construction has spread closer to the Wekiva and St. Johns rivers and as the number of bears has climbed. The area leads the state by far in calls about nuisance bears, with more than 2,000 last year alone.
Not all of those callers would favor hunting, however.
For example, a bear smashed into the garage of Amanda Cox soon after her family moved into a house near the Wekiva in 2007.
"The lady on the phone said, 'Bang some pots and pans,' " Cox said. "I said, 'So my kids are supposed to take pots and pans in their backpacks on the way to the bus?' "
But then Cox noticed that her neighbors were savvy about how to avoid bears, keeping household garbage and even children's snack wrappers out of their reach, and exchanging e-mail alerts to keep others informed.
"It's such a cool experience for my kids to see wild bears," Cox says now. "It would be really sad if they hunted them. We've invaded their space; it's their woods back there."
There would be far more bears roaming the Wekiva-Ocala corridor except that drivers have been hitting and killing 8 percent of them a year on average. Even so, the area's bear population continues to grow 1 percent to 2 percent annually, state biologist Walter McCown says.
That steady growth is probably the reason that some bears, pressured by the group's dominant males to find new turf, are attempting to adapt to Orlando's suburbs.
"They eat such a variety of food," McCown noted, "and they are very tolerant of humans — more than humans are tolerant of them."
As such, Florida bears are catching up with those in New Jersey, where state officials oversaw a controversial six-day hunt last month.
"There was no other viable option to reduce the population," said Larry Ragonese, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. "Last year, I think there were 43 cases of bears actually breaking into people's houses."
The Sierra Club criticized the New Jersey hunt as a simple appeasement of hunting advocates who supported the 2009 election of Gov.
Chris Christie and as a way to make rural development easier.
"It's hard to sell a condo to somebody from Brooklyn if they see a black bear," said Jeff Tittel, that state's Sierra director. He said his state chapter would likely back hunting if it was designed to handle problem bears and occurred in concert with aggressive public education.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of hunting is whether it would reduce the number of bear complaints.
Laurie Macdonald, Florida director for Defenders of Wildlife, said bears become a nuisance when people are careless with their household garbage, pet food and other tasty temptations.
In 1993, her group started the Habitat for Bears Campaign, which sent volunteers knocking on Florida doors with information about how to coexist with the animals. Such efforts, she said, would reduce bear complaints more effectively than would hunters.
John Wooding, one of the most experienced bear biologists in Florida, worries that the wily animals are so driven by their stomachs that public education won't be enough.
"They're going to quit being so visible if somebody out there is shooting at them," said Wooding, who works in North Carolina. "I think it's in the bears' interest to be a little more low-key. If they were to hurt somebody badly and fall out of favor with the public, it would be much harder to generate interest in their conservation."
Roland Kays Scott LaPoint holding a tranquilized male fisher with a tracking collar.
Scott LaPoint The urban study site has four times the density of roads and 15 times the population density of the wild site.
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