Black bears are thriving and reclaiming old Wyoming haunts, even amid record hunting

Where Rob Brossman operates bait sites in the southeast corner of the Wind River Range, he knows there are plenty of black bears out there to gobble up the peanuts he leaves. 

“I know the population where I hunt is getting bigger and bigger,” Brossman said, “because I’m seeing a lot of bears.” 

Although Brossman, his friends and family might only pull the trigger on two or three of the bruins a year at the sites he maintains, he’s seeing 15 or 20 individual animals annually. It’s a clear and noticeable increase from when he first started hunting in Wyoming a decade ago, he said.

Brossman shared that view at a Dec. 2 Wyoming Game and Fish Department public meeting in Lander about black bear hunting. In the unit where Brossman hunts, the agency was weighing a proposal to increase the maximum number of female bears that could be killed by four, about which he offered no misgivings. Increased quotas have also been proposed in the Gros Ventre Range, Sierra Madre Range, Snowy Range and the Laramie Mountains. 

The Lander outdoorsman’s observation about seeing more black bears in southwestern Fremont County aligns with a statewide trend. It’s a golden era of modern, regulated black bear hunting, with a new record number of animals killed each of the last three years. Since the late 1990s, the number of black bear hunting licenses sold has roughly tripled, jumping from 2,000 to nearly 7,000. Hunter success rates have stayed around 10%, and as a result, the tally of hunter-killed bears has tripled, climbing from under 200 to nearly 700 annually.

Yet simultaneously, populations are doing well — so well that Ursus americanus is even reoccupying old areas within its native range where the species has been functionally absent since the Western settlement era. 

“From here, we’ve seen expansion into Green Mountain, the Seminoes,” Game and Fish Large Carnivore Supervisor Dan Thompson said at the Lander meeting. “From other directions, we’ve seen expansion east of the Bighorns. It’s not monumental. It’s more incremental.” 

The only major chunk of forested Wyoming habitat black bears have not truly reoccupied is in the state’s far northeast corner, such as the Bear Lodge Mountains and Black Hills. But even there, hunters have “picked up a few,” Thompson said, and there are indications that black bears are starting to reoccupy the region — just like mountain lions did around the turn of the century. 

The recent gains are tied to healthy densities and black bears being managed as a game species. There are limits on the number of females that can be killed in 33 of 35 Wyoming hunt areas. The exceptions are: area 32, located in the lower-elevation parts of the Bighorn Basin, and area 35, which stretches across the state from the southwest to the northeast and was formerly mostly unoccupied. Because females are the reproductive engines of the population, this management strategy has enabled the incremental expansion Wyoming is now experiencing. 

“Hunting is not negatively impacting black bear populations, and I would say that across North America,” Thompson said. 

All around the Lower 48, black bears are increasing their range, according to news reports from West Texas, Louisiana, central Minnesota and Michigan.

Generally, black bear populations have done well and the species has regained old ground without major pushback. There have been recent high-profile, unsuccessful efforts to politicize the management of large carnivores like mountain lions and grizzly bears.

“I would say there’s not the controversial drama with black bears as there is with some of the other species we have,” Thompson said. 

There have been a few exceptions. After the severe winter of 2022-’23 walloped herds of mule deer and pronghorn, emotional hunting outfitters called for wildlife managers to knock back several carnivore species, black bears included, in the Wyoming Range.   

State officials complied and boosted efforts to kill mountain lions and coyotes, but they left the black bear hunting regulations unchanged, partly because they were able to demonstrate the bruins were already being intensively hunted. 

“We’re essentially harvesting up to a third of the population annually,” Thompson said. 

One point of evidence is in the age structure, he said. Like with mountain lions in most places statewide, the black bear population in the Wyoming Range is “primarily a sub-adult population,” because older animals get hunted out. 

To black bear hunting advocate Joe Kondelis, the species’ growth in Wyoming and nationally “highlights the message that hunting is conservation.”  

“We can have regulated hunting seasons for a species and at the same time increase numbers and the health of a population,” said Kondelis, a Cody resident who presides over the American Bear Foundation. “We have healthy populations across the U.S., and we are even seeing new hunting opportunities in places like Louisiana and Florida.”

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In Kondelis’ view, Game and Fish has done a “good job” of balancing Wyoming black bear hunting opportunities with the conservation of the species. That’s “difficult,” he added, because it’s becoming evermore popular to hunt black bear, and yet it’s a species that has a slow reproductive rate, at least relative to commonly hunted ungulates like elk or deer. 

“To me, it’s a testament to the survivability of black bears,” Kondelis said. “They are one of the most adaptable species in North America. They are so unique and just don’t get the credit they deserve as a species.”